Making Music

This week I will release my first single as a solo artist.

My musical career has consisted of worship leading at churches and large events from my teenage years to my late twenties.
In my early years of college, I was also half of a musical duo with my sister; we opened for bands touring through Albuquerque and recorded a home-grown, folksy EP in Oregon.

I have sung in plays and musicals since I was a child. I have sung the national anthem before games since I was in middle school. I’ve done a couple weddings. And I’ve been showing up early at church soundchecks on Sundays for the last 15 years. These opportunities have ebbed and flowed. My love and joy for all these stages have waxed and waned.

But I have always been a song writer.
I’ve been making songs up regularly since I could shower without the help of my parents. And when I write songs, I feel like my soul can say things that the rest of me wouldn’t know how to articulate.

While I think an important aspect of deconstruction is to return to sacred truths, learn to hold them close, and treat them as precious— I can say confidently that in 2017, worship leading and worship song writing for a decade had become a leading cause of the writer’s block I faced when we first moved to New York. I had conditioned myself to constantly try and write the next big worship song for a congregation. If they can sing it and understand it, if it “aligns” with my church’s theology, then the song needs to be finished and heard. This kind of thinking completed atrophied my ability to write candidly and embrace different ways to express myself lyrically, musically, vocally.

Since deconstructing and finding Good Shepherd New York, singing and making music with other people took on a whole new dimension and meaning for me. When the world shut down amidst a global pandemic, singing informally at church every Sunday became an online presentation that required of me: a) a really nice microphone and b) some basic skills in LogicPro. For the first time since I was 20 years old, I was forced to invest in a kind of learning and growth that involved music recording.
The time I spent alone in our apartment during the NYC lockdown led me to online piano lessons, weekly recording, and dusting off an old book gifted to Alex and I when we were dating: “The Artist’s Way” by Julia Cameron. I worked through each chapter over the spring and summer of 2020 from the roof of our apartment building. I’d bake in the sun up there, crying while I completed the writing assignments about childhood memories or narratives on why I wouldn’t believe in myself as a musician (since at the time, I only saw myself as a back-slidden worship leader).

Slowly but surely, I was becoming unblocked. I was writing weird songs and trying to stretch my fingers across weird chords. I was reading music again. Other assignments from the book included baking a pie, planting some seeds, sewing up the holes in my clothes, buying myself new sheets. Between a life of quarantine in New York City and that book, I was healing.

In the spring of 2021 I was invited to record vocals with the Good Shepherd Collective team for our digital church and streaming project. It was at a beautiful recording studio, situated in the middle of a pecan farm, right on the border of Mexico. The day before my flight, I panicked and told Alex I didn’t want to go. I called my sister and told her that all the professional musicians there (whom I didn’t know) would think I was nobody, that I would probably be left alone in a corner whenever I didn’t have to sing, that I was nervous. I was wrestling with a version of myself I didn’t think existed. “I’m not a recording artist or a musician. Or a singer. I’m just a girl who sang at church her whole life.”
Needless to say, that trip changed my life and was the final phase of my recent transformation as a song writer and musician. I had finished “The Artist’s Way” and was watching Cameron’s idea of “synchronicity” play out in my life, in real time. All the musicians I spent time with there became my friends. They lifted me up, encouraged me, gave me tips on making music, writing, playing my instrument— on and on and on.
The first sessions at Sonic Ranch were dubbed “Band Camp”. It was so successful for all involved, that we all scheduled another trip for July of 2021. I knew that the next few months before Band Camp II would need to be spent mining new songs and finishing old ones, seeing if there was anything I wanted to bring back to the studio with the team and record for myself, with my name, my voice, and my words. (Interestingly, one of my 2021 New Year’s Resolutions was to record music, before ever getting a call from Good Shepherd in March.) I worked hard to save up extra money to spend on the project. Alex was fully on board. He’d heard me dream of making my own music since the day we met. Now I had a way to do it in one of the most beautiful and famous recording studios in the world with dear friends and amazing musicians.

Long story made sort-of short, I recorded four original songs last year at Sonic Ranch. The songs are about times in my life where God felt very far away, when I lost my faith, and then found it all over again.
I worked tirelessly to write, record demos, and compose everything on my own little laptop in my own little 1 bedroom, East Village apartment. Then I took the songs to Band Camp and showed them to my new friends, hoping they’d hop on their instrument and breathe life into each one. (By the way, I might as well have been standing naked in front of all of them when my crappy demos filled the studio rooms— it was scary to share such an intimate part of myself that I’d worked so hard on, but everyone was so welcoming and open to playing them.)
The finished products are breathtaking. My pride and my joy, the songs are a fulfillment of so many things I knew God promised me when I was still clueless and hopeless about what making music would ever mean to me again.

Now, it’s a new time of testing for my newly found-and-embraced-artist-identity: I did the work, I wrote the songs, I recorded them with beautiful, brilliant people, and now I have to let them go— to streaming platforms and into friends’ and family members’ hands, out in the wild, public.
A friend took some photos of me for my album art and another friend designed a cover for each song. Of course that was weird. It’s weird to pose for promotional photos. It’s weird to ask for help. It’s weird to invest in your own creation. I’ve had to teach myself to care what my music will sound like and look like; to carry excellence out all the way through…from overall feel to expression, down to the tiny details that I used to overlook, deeming myself to “deep” to care about them.
I’ve learned that my songs deserve excellence because I poured myself into them. I believe God likes them. I believe She helped me write them. I like them. I think people would like to hear them. So, my music is special enough to do special (albeit weird-feeling) promotional things for.

Now, I have to tell people about my music. And share with others that I am a musician, a singer-song-writer. I have to say it in New York City and feel so basic and just like all the other artists who move here and say that.
But it hits different cause I know that it’s true about who I am— an artist, a musician, a song-writer.

I’ve even adjusted my little website to be more than just a place for my blog. I’ve posted some photos and prepared some other promotional material. I’ve started spreading the word to people I love and hope that they’ll get it out to more people who will appreciate my work.

Sticking your neck out about what you’ve made and believing that others will be grateful for it is so far the hardest task of this project. But when I think of my songs and my soul that was stuffed down for so long, and I know that it’s worth all this extra effort.

The act alone of making music and giving it away is so fulfilling and something I’ve always wanted to do. It feels right because it is right. And it’s been a long time coming. So here goes nothing. Can’t wait for people to hear my songs, however many, whoever many, the listeners may be.

It’s So Dark is coming out Thursday, 1/27/22.
You can presave the song here.