AndyRogersMusic.com - Blog

I’m  getting tantalizingly close to pressing the launch button on ‘Mercy Tracks Me Down’ the new worship album created, in part, from the songs birthed during the 20-20 project.

I’ve been road testing some of these songs during live worship events both here in Ireland and the US and it’s been great to see them working with real live people.

In fact you may have been one of them!

Anyways here’s a sample of half a dozen of the tracks all joined together in one mp3.

It’s just over 8 minutes long so make yourself a cup of your favourite beverage and enjoy!

Mercy Tracks Me Down Preview

You can click on it to play or right click and ’save as’ to download.

Oh and another thing I’m going to pay you to be my ‘record company’ if you’re interested. I’ll keep you posted on that.

As I write this I’m still in Nashville and I thought you might like to see how the recording of some of the songs from the 20/20 project is going.

We’ve been working on song number 3 (and others) from the 20/20 project ‘Your Name Is A Refuge (and we are refugees)’

Here’s a quick clip from the studio to let you see how it’s going.

Oh, if you’re interested I’m going to need some help with some lyric ideas for the other songs we’re working on. If you’d like the opportunity to help co-write on these make sure you’re registered over at OpenSourceSongs.com and I’ll keep you posted.

In the meantime here’s the video..

My producer, Neil Andrews, is also a great worship leader and really understands recording worship music. If you need a project worked on I could really recommend his services - you can work completely remotely with him via the internet (if you don’t live anywhere near Franklin, TN) you’ll get Nashville quality without Nashville prices!

Drop him a line at nra.minimoog [at] gmail.com

Cheers - Andy

Readers of this blog may have been wondering where the last 2 songs of the 20/20 project (writing 20 songs in 20 weeks) got to. I ended up with 18 songs posted here.

Your help would be invaluable.

You might be a worship leader, songwriter, musician or you might be
none of those, maybe you have an ear for a decent song - great!  

I’d love to have you as part of the ‘pre-launch’ team.

Simply go to www.OpenSourceSongs.com and hop on board.

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I’ve been writing up my review of 2007 for my Trustees (I’m partly supported in Christian worship and arts by Deep End Trust) and during the process of documenting the last year two things have emerged that have really stood out.

I find I’m actually running to catch up with these two ideas that the Lord appears to be breathing on and they seem to have taken on a life of their own as it were.

One of those things is the ‘open source’ songwriting idea that we tested on my blog (I’ll write in more detail about the other in another blog post).

It has wildly exceeded my expectations.

While I was on a ministry trip in Thailand I got an email from Sam Middlebrook from www.developingworship.com/forum about one of the song ideas that I had invited contributions to, he wrote…

“I’ve used the song a few times now, and last week, a I got over 300 requests to do it again over email, feedback cards, phone calls and the like. (the week nine song, with my second verse idea)”

You see, Sam had taken the song idea and added his ideas to it and tried it out in his church. When I read that email the significance of what we had inadvertently achieved struck me like a ton of bricks.

    1. Thousands of people had used the song in their worship. Sam is the worship leader at a large church in Washington.

    2. Together we had completely bypassed the traditional ‘music industry’ system of music distribution.

Think about it.

The ultimate aim for any worship songwriter is to have people connect with God through singing their songs. The whole industry norm of getting a publishing deal, recording a CD, touring and getting a record and distribution deal at the end of the day should be about having real people at the other end sing songs that help them connect with God.

Don’t get me wrong, I like selling CDs as much as the next guy but that process should be a support mechanism, not the main aim in itself!

    3. We created a song that probably neither of us would have created on our own. To be honest the initial song idea was lying around half finished in my to do pile for at least 5 years - all it needed was some creative input from others.
And here’s another thing, maybe the song isn’t even finished yet! The creative Commons agreement that I’ve used to initiate the idea allows each contributor to still own their piece of the song. We could go on to refine the song even further or incorporate contributions from others.

And Sam isn’t the only one who has done something creative with this process.

Faye Smith for example did an interesting thing with one of the other songs that I’d invited contributions on. Faye took the lyric idea added to it and used a completely different melody and rhythm (you can see her version here)

Matt McChlery, on the other hand took the original melody idea but filled in the gaps with his own lyric ideas. So now we have 2 distinct songs, different co-writers all from the same initial idea. And again the creative commons license allows for the appropriate ownership of each work.

And I know many others of you chipped in with very valuable contributions to the process (sorry if I’ve left you out in these examples).

As you can probably tell I’m excited about these tests and I’ve been working away in my ‘lab’ to create a community that will make it even easier for us to work together using this collaborative process.

And this is where I need your help.

I need to test the system before I go fully live and public with it.

In the next few days I’m going to send a link to the subscribers on my email list to invite you in as a ‘pre-launch member’ to help try out the system and iron out the teething challenges that inevitably come with any new idea.

You might be a worship leader, songwriter, musician or you might be none of those, maybe you’d just like to have a go at the process of songwriting - great I’d love to have you as part of the ‘pre-launch’ team.

If you’re up for that make sure that you’re on my mailing list and I’ll be in touch soon.

Andy

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Since getting back from Thailand I still haven’t managed to get caught up on all the stuff that’s on my To Do list including adding the final 2 songs for the 20/20 project.

However, in the meantime I thought I’d ‘kill two birds with the one stone’ as they say.

I’m working through a mountain of video clips from the Pattaya Praise event in Thailand where we led worship in brothels, churches and public stages.

Below is a clip of our team’s orientation walk through the streets of Pattaya on our first full day there. I’ve avoided lingering too much on the seedier side of life there but at the same time wanted to let you have a glimpse of the nature of the city.

It is a place built on the sex industry and the street in the clip, Walking Street, is one of the more ‘palatable’ sections of that part of town.

Here’s the second thing. As a sound track I’ve added an older demo song of mine called We Say Yes and it needs a re-write.

So once again I’d love your comments and suggestions as to how it might be improved.

Drop me a comment below or an email if you’re on my list and let’s see what we can create!

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Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 Unported License.

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In week 16 of the 20/20 project I floated a song idea and invited contributions and alternative suggestions, and frankly I’ve been overwhelmed by the feedback and ideas that you came up with.

Faye and Mike Smith have come up with this one below - leave a comment below and let me know what you think.

There are a few others who have ‘weighed’ in with other ideas which I plan to highlight in another post. This open source songwriting idea has created some possibilities that I hadn’t foreseen at the outset.

Take Faye’s song for example - she has used the original lyrical thought and theme and developed a different melody and rhythm along with additional lyrics effectively creating a new version of the song. We could have 2 or more ‘If You Counted Sin’ songs each with a different set of co-writers.

There might be a few administrative challenges with that from a publishing point-of-view but the potential to have songs ‘out there’ working and helping people connect with God in worship is hugely exciting to me.

What do you think?

Check out Faye’s MySpace http://www.myspace.com/fayesmithmusicforgod

Hi Folks

Here’s song 18 of the project (a little late!).

It’s one that I have rewritten a few times and now I have this “can’t see the wood for the trees” feeling!

As before - let me know if you see any improvements that could be made.

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Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 License.

There’s just so much to tell these days that I sometimes don’t know where to start so I’ll talk to you about this week’s song and some of the headlines.

Before I do that let me say thanks for the response to last weeks effort and the contributions that have come in - I’m already behind in processing and replying to them. Bear with me and I will get back to you soon!

This week’s song, ‘I am Satisfied’, is a joint effort between my wife Shirely and I. It’s not really a congregational song but a worship song that could be done in non-church environments.

The reason I wanted to do some material like that is because over the next few weeks and months I’m going to find myself in the strangest of situations.

Next month I’m off with a musicians and artists team to Lithuania (yeah, I had to look it up on the map too!) to work with a Vineyard church there and quite by ‘accident’ we managed to get booked the play at the premier night club and music venue in the city.

Then in November I’m off to Thailand, again with a team, to participate in an annual intercessory worship festival there in the city of Pattaya. Now the thing is, Pattaya is the epicentre of the sex industry in that country and we have the opportunity to put worship bands into some of the ‘bars’ (read that as brothels)!

Some of the local churches and ministries there are radically reaching out and expressing Jesus to their community and we get to be a part of it. I’d love to keep you posted on this adventure, if you’re not already on my email newsletter list then join below and you’ll get to hear all about it.

In the meantime let me have your feedback on song 17 - I am Satisfied.

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Well, here we are at week 16 of the project an this time I’ve come up with a simple Gospel song with an Americana ballad feel, something I haven’t really done before.

I’d like to throw this song open for co-writing, I’ve got a verse and pre-chorus going on here but not much else at this stage.

I haven’t fully articulated what I’m about to share with you before, but this seems like a good opportunity to unveil an idea that I have had for a while.

Open source songwriting. I have this hunch that there is a wealth of creativity that could be tapped into if the the songwriting process could have an ‘open source’ shared ownership to it.

Here’s how I see it working:

I’d like to see a community of songwriters, musicians and lyric writers

One of us has an idea, maybe a lyric and a bit of a melody or perhaps a couple of complete verses but no chorus. We share our embryonic idea and invite others to contribute suggestions. Other members of the community take what’s on the table, add their creativity to the original idea and share their version of the song. This process gets repeated as often as necessary until the originator of the idea is happy with the final product. The person who initiates an idea always retains the right to accept or reject other contributions.

So who owns the end product then?

My suggestion is that the person who initiated the project owns at least 50% of the song. The other 50% is equally owned by whatever number of other contributors work was accepted. For example, if the suggestions of three other writers were used in the final song then they each own 16.66% (50% divided by three).

The beauty is that it is potentially win-win for all parties and contributions can be covered by the Creative Commons licensing process which allows free sharing of ideas as long as they are not used for commercial gain with out permission of the owner. This means that ideas contrubuted, whether used or not, still belong to the person who came up with them - yet by contributing them to a project they could create something greater than the sum of it’s parts!

Anyhow, I’ll write more about this in future - in the meantime here’s the song for your comments and/or contributions.

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.

Some of the lyrics weren’t clear in the video basically becasue I tried to sing it in a key that was too low!

Here’s a much clearer mp3 if-you-counted-sin.mp3

Howdy folks,

Thanks to all of you who emailed over the last few days - your encouragement and generosity are amazing.

The good news is the Laptop is fixable and should be up and running later this week, the guitar is repairable and will go into the capable hands of Geoffrey Craig (a local guitar tech genius with a client list that includes; Nancy Griffiths, Van Morrsion band members, Ash and many others).

In the meantime I’m muddling through with the family PC, negotiating computer time between homeworks and my kids need to be on MSN or Bebo or Facebook etc etc all at the same time! (when I was a kid we did a radical thing - we just talked to each other!). I guess I’m one to talk as I’m a bit of a gadget and internet junkie too.

Anyways, below you’ll find 2 videos of ‘catch-up’ material to bring us back up to speed in the 20/20 song project.

As ever I’d love your comments and feedback.

Here you go…..

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