Blog
Our New Album 'Everlasting'
A season filled with ministry, indecision and finally the decision to go into full-time music ministry held the experiences that birthed the songs in our second full-length album, Everlasting.
Everlasting, produced by Dale Willis and mastered by Grammy award-winner William Bowden, is an album encased with motifs inspired by Isaiah 40:28. The lyrics are loaded with raw honesty and deeply biblical content. Musically, the album is the fruit of collaboration, with a cinematic thread woven through elements of folk, pop and alternate sounds underscoring raw and emotional vocals. In production we decided to focus on genuine and honest moments rather than flawless performance to service the lyrical content of the album.
With a lyrical narrative of two acts, Everlasting, at its base level explores the struggle between doubt and faith. In opener “Temporary”, Australiana flavour encases specific language that lays out the struggle of Romans 7:15-25. The classical flavours of Eric’s piano are layered in the cinematic orchestration of “Don’t Miss The Boat” to express the lyrics “This world is out of control. Spinning round in circles. Blurring all our morals. What’s right? What’s wrong?” This inner conflict is continued in “Doubting Thomas” with the lyrics “I know that You’re there, even when I don’t feel so”. With a folk melody of acoustic guitar, mandolin and banjo, Everlasting’s centre track “Surrender” concludes the album’s first act dealing with spiritual struggle and points towards the second act that focus’ on faith and the Everlasting God. “God Is Love” and “Thank You” were the only two tracks on the album for the vocals to be recorded in one take each. This detail imbues a quiet atmosphere of praise in both the lyrics and the sparse, raw instrumentation. Orion, inspired by Revelation 21 & 22, creates a day dream journey about our future journey to heaven when Jesus comes to take us home. The closing track “There We Rise” is a jubilant call in both lyrical content and orchestration that follows Eric’s piano towards to the hope and assurance we have in Jesus Christ.
Everlasting was made possible through a successful crowd-funding Kickstarter campaign that was the fruition of the world-wide encouragement and support that has continually grown since the beginning of our music ministry journey. The Kickstarter campaign saw 155 people from around the world come together into a community that collectively backed $16,849 in October, 2014 to partner with us to produce an album aimed at giving God the glory.
Our prayer is that our new album Everlasting will encourage you in moments of struggle, pain, hurt, and doubt by uplifting the Everlasting God who is love.
"Do you not know?
Have you not heard?
The Lord is the everlasting God,
the Creator of the ends of the earth.
He will not grow tired or weary,
and his understanding no one can fathom."
Isaiah 40:28
We're planning on putting up a blog series going into the meaning behind each of the the twelve songs on 'Everlasting'. Make sure you check back!
Our new album "Everlasting" is available now to buy on iTunes, Google Play and our website store.
'Everlasting' Is Nearly Here!
“You guide each sun through space. Each star has a name, has a place." New Lyrics from our new album 'Everlasting'.
Only 2 days until our new album 'Everlasting' comes out! Super excited to share this! It's an album full of personal faith journey moments and explorations of the Everlasting God. To celebrate we are doing 3 online, live-stream concerts on the 21 July for 3 timezones! Each concert will be an interactive experiences with stories and new songs! You can request your favourites as well. For more details and pay-what-you-want tickets (low as $1) go to Concert Window. There are 3 concerts, so make sure you choose the best one for your timezone.
Too exciting! Hope you can join us.
Eric & Monique
The Making of 'Everlasting'
We are amazed and astounded at how quickly things come together when put into God’s hands. I know we shouldn’t be, we’ve seen it time and time again in our lives, but God still amazes us! We had been writing songs for a new album since the release of our first, but with no way to actually record them. A few years ago, with no easily seen financial options, some friends encouraged us to use Kickstarter to which we bulked at! It’s too scary! So, we kept praying, thinking, planning for another year. Around June last year, we went through our songs, whittling them down, making changes and improvements. We came to a startling realisation that 14 songs out of the 20-odd we were seriously considering for a new CD were as though they had been written for one theme!
As we sat there, reading Isaiah 40:28 and comparing it to the progression in the songs, we realised that God had already been guiding this album’s progress before we were even aware. While we were still in the nervous stage of the unknown, He had been inspiring and guiding this project. This realisation gave us feeling that to keep holding back these songs out of fear of how we would finance it would be selfish and untrusting in God's providence. So, we began to pray for faith and leading. We explored a few options, until we came to the realisation that Kickstarter was the only option open to us. With a lot of fear, anxiety and tons of prayer (to be completely honest) we set about preparing our Kickstarter project for release. God came through! 155 wonderful people backed our CD and became a part of the community that propelled forward our new album. So thankful! The Kickstarter project was successfully funded at the end of October 2014. In January 2015 we recorded the CD and now, May, while sitting at my laptop typing this blog; the CD is mastered, the artwork is done and the CD is nearly ready for replication. Amazing! There have been so many God-ordained moments that have brought us again to the realisation of how God has had and still has His hand on the production of this album.
We found the process of production on Everlasting to be an entirely different experience than with Pilgrim. We began pre-production in November over Google+ Hangouts with our producer, Dale Willis. The purpose of pre-production is to help put into words an outline of what we heard in our heads for each of the songs and to put the vision of the album together. It gave us the opportunity to go through our demos with fresh ears and with Dale to again polish the lyrics and song structure. We also looked at the musical influences for each song to help formulate a song-by-song plan for instrumentation and the overall sound of the album. It was an in-depth process that we felt invaluable to help begin form these songs into something that had both musical and spiritual integrity. We began with the desire for the music to reflect and enhance the lyrical content with authenticity. We ended the pre-production time with the understanding that the project was very ambitious and spent time going through what could be cut out and refined to help make the project more attainable. The amazing thing is that by the end of production we were actually able to do what we originally envisioned! Praise God!
Arriving at Psalter Studios we were filled with excitement and trepidation with so much to accomplish with relatively little time and budget. We had arrived early and took the time to walk through the two sound proof doors into the studio. As the sound proof doors closed behind us it was like walking into an airlock. The silence of the studio was deafening and we felt both excited and nervous. It gave us the immediate compounding thought, "This is actually happening!!!” The silence of the room was all encompassing and the reality of the moment sunk into the point of it nearly being overwhelming. Yet, like a blank canvass or a fresh sheet of paper, the room was filled with promise and potential for all the was to be accomplished over the next 2 1/2 weeks.
Looking back at those 2 1/2 weeks they were in-depth, creatively intense and pushed us creatively further than we thought we could go.
Blessings & love,
Eric & Monique