There were seven of us.
And even in 2005, we were not kids. Most of us were already in our thirties, already had children, already had jobs and mortgages and all the things that are supposed to kill the dream of being in a rock band.
But each of us grew up with a burning in our belly to use music as a way of healing, just like we had in high school and college. So the crazy idea came to pass. We wrote lyrics. We made guitar parts. We laid down bass. We put drums where drums belonged. We recorded everything in the studio at Cornerstone Church. And somehow, surprisingly, it all came together fast.
We ended up playing three main shows. We started at Crave, a high school and college concert venue that used secular music to communicate the need for the gospel. Then we got invited to lead worship for a thousand youth students at Ignite, a youth rally down in Des Moines. And finally, we opened for 38th Parallel, a band that saw real success in the mid-2000s. For a handful of grown men playing music we never thought anyone outside our circle would hear, it truly was a dream come true.
We sent our recordings off to Disc Makers, back when that was a thing. We remember getting our thousand CDs in a box and opening them like giddy children on Christmas morning, gazing at the beauty of the silver circle with our original insert and artwork.
We sold about forty.
I still have boxes and boxes of those CDs sitting in my house. And it is completely okay. I got to do what I had always dreamed of doing. I got to be in a rock band.
Fast forward to the world of AI. Andy, our guitar player, realized that uploading our old songs gave us the ability to completely remix everything we had done. For about three months, Andy and I reimagined and reheard the songs that had been living in our ears since the beginning, but that we never had the tens of thousands of dollars to mix properly.
What you hear before you is beauty and music to our ears. Some of it has been reimagined. Most of it has just been remixed.
None of this has been done with any thought of getting the gang back together. That would quite frankly be silly. Most of us are in our fifties now. Some of us are empty nesters. That would be something to laugh at.
But you need to know this has been one of the most fun things I have gotten to reimagine in a very long time.
For most of you, this song style will not lock in. I feel bad for you, because there is something about this sound that captures the seven of us. I hope in some way you are able to hear what we intended, or at least what we wanted to see happen in the mid-2000s. I hope you can hear our vision. I hope you can feel at least some of the angst and some of the hope that we meant to put in our music.
If nothing else, this has been a blast for us.
Enjoy.
— The seven of us
All seven of us.
Band photo coming soon
A group shot of the seven of us lands right here.