I know people usually put up a list of the best albums or the best movies of the year around New Years – I thought I’d change it up a little bit and put the best moment I experienced in 2008. I don’t remember the exact date, but I do remember that Yuka and I had gone out for dinner and a couple of beers at a local tavern (Johnny’s Tavern).. When we got home, Yuka decided to take a pregnancy test because she felt like something was a little off. She had taken multiple tests in the past, but they had always come up negative. We were sure this time would be the same. She took the test while I was in the other room hanging out – she said “Uh… Sam??” – I came in, thinking she was joking, and looked at the little, life-changing piece of plastic that had a big pink plus sign on it. We hadn’t been waiting or even trying for this moment, but it had finally arrived. The moment I saw the positive symbol, I knew our lives were never going to be the same. 2 months from now, we’ll have a little girl named Hannah in our arms. We can’t wait. However, one thing we’re not looking forward to is changing diapers – neither Yuka or I have ever changed a diaper before. That will be a fun thing to learn..
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Christmas 2008 has now come and gone, but the spirit of Christmas lives on in our hearts forever. It’s amazing to think that in just a few days, it will be 2009! This Christmas, my wife, my family, and I went to our church for a Christmas morning church service. It was the first time I’ve been to a Christmas morning church service. It was mostly singing carols and reading from the Bible. Having my family there made it really enjoyable.
I bought my wife a piano tuning kit for Christmas – it’s not the easiest thing to use, but we’re getting better at it. We spent about 8 hours on Christmas and the day after Christmas trying to tune our piano. We finally got it – now we’re at my brother and his wife’s house tuning their piano (well, Yuka is tuning their piano – I’m updating my website).
I hope everyone had a great Christmas and has a Happy New Year! Drop me a line! Let’s get interactive!?!
I didn’t want to get too personal on this site (to protect myself and my family from all my crazy fan stalkerz out there), but I’ve got to make a little announcement.
My wife and I found out she was pregnant about 5 months ago.. and we wanted to find out what we were having, but we didn’t want to pay the extra $$ to get a ‘4-d’ sonogram, so we waited for a medical reason to have one done so it would be covered by our insurance. Long story short, a medical reason hasn’t come up yet, so we decided to go for the 4-d. It was only $75, so that was nice.. We didn’t get any good face shots, but we did get what we were looking for. We found out we’re having a girl! She shall be named ‘Hannah Keiko Billen’. Hannah means flower in Japanese (Hana) and my mom’s middle name was Kay, and Keiko (pronounced Kay-co) is a commonly used Japanese girl’s name, I thought it was a cool ‘fusion’ of our cultures. Our due date is Valentine’s Day – it’s fast approaching!
I’m sure I’ll be posting a lot of pics once she’s born, so be ready!
Tags: baby Hannah Keiko Billen
Late last week, I went over to the Lawrence Journal World building to do a podcast about my Christmas album with lawrence.com journalist, Richard Gintowt. The first thing he told me when I arrived was ‘Hey, there’s another local musician that did a Christmas album and we’re going to have him do this podcast with us. He used to play in a band called Kelpie..’ When I was in the Billions, we had played with Kelpie a few times and I knew they were good guys, so I actually looked forward to doing it together. When we first met up with Josh Atkinson, I recognized him, not from Kelpie, but from one of my favorite local restaurants, Wheatfields. He had helped my wife and I many-a-time and he was always a really nice guy. Since some of my friends (Evan and Mina) had worked at Wheatfields before, I also knew we had some mutual friends.
As we started walking around looking for a good location to take a picture for the podcast, Josh and I started talking. It turned out that he had been living in Japan teaching English for the last two years and was planning to go back this summer for another year. His girlfriend is also from Japan. (Any of you reading this that know me should know the amount that I love and respect Japan and Japanese culture.) It was awesome to hear about what he did over there and where he was living over there and so on. (Later on, we even threw Richard off quite a bit by randomly throwing some Japanese into our interview – he seriously looked like a deer in the headlights!) In our conversations, Josh also mentioned that he had played in a band back in the day in KC called Loredo – I’m not 100% sure if the Billions ever played with them, but I know we played in the same Kansas City music circuit as them (RIP New Earth) and I remember hearing about them for years.
As the night progressed, and the interview insued, some magical moments occurred (magical = the feeling you get when Mannheim Steamroller hits the perfect chord on their Roland XI-740 keyboard). The layout of the interview was awesome – Richard burnt a CD with Josh and I’s songs intermixed and he’d bring in soundclips throughout the interview – and Josh and I really had similar answers for every question asked (aka ‘What is the true meaning of Christmas?’. It may sound a little cheesy (cheesy = the feeling you get when Mannheim Steamroller hits the perfect chord on their Roland XI-740), but I think my Christmas album/project has helped me in so many ways. There are so many things that I have seen and people that I have met that I would not have, had I not been inspired to do the album.
Two links I want to share with you: the podcast and Josh’s myspace page where you can get his Christmas music. CHECK THEM OUT!!
I know some of you are thinking ‘Enough about the Christmas album already!!’ so I decided to give you all a breather.
A friend recently introduced me to an awesome (new?) band called Fleet Foxes. If you haven’t checked them out, do it! It’s sounds like: if you took the good songs from the Shins and the good songs from Midlake and swirled them around together. Awesome music! Here’s one of their videos:
I thought some of you might enjoy this – it’s the promo video that Ken and I threw together last year for my Christmas album.
Tags: christmas, commercial, promo
So, I’ve had a few people ask me ‘What’s up with track 3 on the Christmas album?’ – Here’s the short answer:
My wife was practicing piano for church upstairs as I was recording one day and I decided to ’secretly’ record her by pointing a mic up the stairway. After I got a good clip of her playing, I cut it down, copied and pasted it, reversed some parts, layered it with a ton of reverb, then started experimenting over it. The weird chimes and harp sounds you hear are actually ringtones on my cellphone – I layered those with reverb and copied, pasted, and reversed a section of them as well. After I got that stuff put together, I decided to throw some old 1920’s style vocals on there – I used a tad bit of distortion on them to give them the ‘gritty’ feel that old recordings usually have.. and there you have it. If you listen really close you can hear our dog’s collar jingle in the background at one point in the song.
The funniest part about all of that, is that I was really just totally messing around. I had no intention of putting it on the album, but my brother Dan and friend Ken were like ‘No, no! It’s awesome! You have to put it on there!’ – so.. thanks to them, you actually have 11 songs and 1 joke on your Christmas albums. Please contact them with complaints. 
Tags: christmas
So I recorded a Christmas album of me doing some of my favorite traditional Christmas songs last year. My friends at lawrence.com posted it as a free download and I heard that quite a few people downloaded it and enjoyed it. Since I knew that most of the people that took the time (and computer bytes) to download it were my friends, this year I decided to try to get it out to even more people by having some CDs pressed. My friends and family came forward with donations to cover the costs, and I was able to press a good amount of CDs and give them out all over Lawrence and Topeka, Kansas – and I was even able to send a few hundred copies overseas to people I knew in Japan, Hong Kong, and France to hand out to their friends.
Ultimately, I didn’t want this ‘Christmas project’ to be about promoting my music (but the positive feedback is very encouraging!) – I wanted it to be a way to bless people and hopefully be an inspiration for people to bless other people around them. Although I consider myself a Christian, I haven’t truly felt strong in my faith for a while now. Throughout the course of this project, however, I have seen God at work and, for that reason alone, I’m so happy that I decided to do this. I hope that, if you take the time to listen to the album, you are blessed in a similar way.
On a side note: Last year’s version of the album and this year’s version are a little different. I recorded three new songs for this year’s album (The First Noel, Hark the Herald Angels Sing, and Still, Still, Still) and I took off two songs from last year’s version because they were just a completely different feel from the rest of the album (O Come, O Come Emmanuel and O Come All Ye Faithful) – BUT I’m planning on having those two old songs up to download on this site within the next few days, so please check back soon to download them. If you like Isreali, jazzadelic-fusion, hip-hop, pop-core then I think you’ll really like O Come, O Come Emmanuel.
If you have any questions about my project or if you want to just talk, feel free to e-mail me anytime at sam@sambillen.com.
Tags: christmas
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