christmas

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.

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.

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