November 2011 Offering Of The Month:
"From The Heart"
Written by Rev. James Martin and Edward Jerlin
© 2011 Everlasting Arms Records & Publishing - All Rights Reserved
At this point in time, we're going to put the monthly
offering on hiatus again, so as to focus our efforts
on completing "Songs From The Father".
We would like to leave you with this beautiful song
of Thanksgiving, not only for the holiday, but as an
appropriate way to wrap up this chapter of sharing
our music with you. Blessings to you and yours.
This recording of "From The Heart" is a piano/voice demo and
a glimpse into the very early stages of the creative process between
Pastor Jim and me.
Jim wrote this beautiful song years ago while we were both at
Immanuel Union Church as his way of saying thank you to the
congregation for a very generous gesture that was made to
him and his family.
For Jim and me, a demo recording such as this is often the first
step in the collaborative process. He'll bring an idea to me
in the form of lyrics, or lyrics and a melody, often with a basic
chord structure to work with.
He'll sing it for me once or twice and I'll fumble around the
keyboard while accompanying him, usually keeping the original
chords during the first stab at it, then slowly trying out
various arrangements, tempos, chord substitutions, passing tones,
and piano flourishes around the melody lines, seeing what works,
and what doesn't as we brainstorm. Sometimes the results are sublime;
sometimes they're pretty funny, bordering on ridiculous. At
this stage Jim is very patient with me. Sometimes, as he hears
some of the ideas I'm trying out, it'll spark some new ideas
in him and he'll adapt his melody to some of what I'm doing,
which in turn, can spark more new directions.
This recording was probably the 3rd or 4th pass trying the song.
During this recording session, we were only doing enough to get
Jim's ideas/melodies recorded so that I could
work with them further at a subsequent time. It wasn't until much
later that I really had time to sit down and listen to all the
demos we recorded. As I did, this one really struck me as being
a particularly beautiful piece, very moving, very endearing.
The musical camaraderie between Jim and me was/is apparent and the ideas
were flowing very nicely. As you can hear, not all of them worked,
and there were little hesitations and flubs along the way, but some of
the moments were captured so nicely that I thought it would be cool
to offer this up as a glimpse into what one of these songs sounds
like in its early stages.
This track will more than likely conclude our CD "Strands Of Life Suite", God willing.