Juliana Now Has a Song Too

Well, it is T minus 4 days until we leave to bring home our new daughter.  Those of you who have been following along know that I have been working to finish a song for Juliana so that both our adopted daughters will each have their own song written by their father.  "One Child" has now been completed and is posted to my Soundclick page.  The worship team from Our Savior has made major contributions to this song;  Fred Rosen did the vocal, Kevin Yoreo did the acoustic guitar work, and Mr. Pete Kelly laid down the bass line.  Many thanks guys: you did some awesome work for a very demanding producer (me), and your talents really show through on this recording.
Here is the link to the song:
http://www.soundclick.com/player/single_player.cfm?songid=12014383&q=hi&newref=1

Are you ready for the story behind the song now?

Songwriters learn to tune in to conversations, anything they read, and anything that pops into their minds to create the magic "hooks" that create songs.  Well, back in August of 2011 I was at work at had some words pop into my mind that immediately cried out to me "This should be a song!"  I think the chorus is what came to me first; looking back at the scrap of paper it was written on, the chorus you hear today is pretty close to what I had originally written down.  I thought the movement from "What difference?" to "A world of difference" was pretty clever, so I began to develop the verses to go with it.  After a week or so of beginning to list some verse ideas, it hit me that writing a song about one child was kind of hypocritical since I was not being swayed by Kathy's regular submittals of older waiting children from the China special needs and special focus programs.  So, despite knowing this could be a really good song I filed the scraps away and forgot about them.

Well, time passes and lo and behold Kathy (with helpful nudges from God and the Holy Spirit) opens my heart to begin the process to adopt one of these dear children.  So, in April I remember I have these scraps of paper for a really good song concept and I can now try to finish it up in good conscience.  I had pretty much the basic structure in place by June, and I decided as my Father's Day activity I would sit on our deck and really work on crafting the lyrics to have a consistent cadence from verse to verse and to clean up some of the language.  I submitted a song with 4 verses and no real pre-chorus in place to my fellow songwriters on the Christian Songwriters Network for a critique of the lyrics.  A couple of members really gave me some good inputs, and I created the pre-chorus sections to get from the verses to the chorus.  Then came the total removal of the 4th verse, and I worked the structure to the song you hear today.  I then wrote the music, enlisted my friends from OSLC to collaborate with me on the recording, and at last I am proud to post it for your (hopefully) listening pleasure.

I know Juliana won't be able to make sense of this song for quite a while, but it helped me make sense of this nutty process of giving up the easy life and going back to a second go around of raising children.  I sure am glad I didn't throw those scraps of paper away.

Posted by Steve