Writing About Writing About Jesus... and some other things too

how to write a musical in 4 days

Mon, 24 May 2010 07:48:15 -0500

PART 2 - TUESDAY

(Ronnie just spent the night at our house and it reminded me that I needed to continue this story... postponed because of my crazy schedule for the past week.)

By Tuesday, Ronnie and I were really outlining the musical and finding the emotional moments we wanted to hit in it. We had our opener... “No More Waiting.” It would also close the musical. We had the title song, “Finished.” We knew that it would come close to the end.

We decided to look through our old catalog of songs we’ve written together in the past few years, ‘cause we thought there might be one or two that might fit this project. We found two.

The first is a song called “Respond To You.” I don’t know if Ronnie remembers the day we wrote it over in one of the writing rooms at the Provident Building, but I certainly do. I remember how he turned sideways on the piano bench and looked at me and said, “People get all confused about worship, when it really just comes down to us responding to God.” I love what the second verse says:

Father, we abandon all that pleases us
Our desire is pleasing you
We come into your presence
We come empty-handed
Overwhelmed with gratitude for who you are
In light of who we are...

The second song we decided to use was written last year. It’l provide what I think will be a wonderful reverent moment toward the end of the musical. It’s also being cut by an artist that I am so excited about... but I’ll talk about that another time. The song talks about how our whole reason for living and being is to glorify God.

So our song count of “seven-to-go” was now down to five.

I told Ronnie that I had this idea about the Garden of Gethsemane. Even though the cross is the place where Jesus made the ultimate sacrifice for us, it was the garden where He said, “If it be possible, let this cup pass from me. Nevertheless, not my will, but Thine be done.” That’s where His final surrender took place. I had an idea for a song called “Surrender To The Cross.” Even though it would have “cross” in the title, it would essentially be about that moment in the garden.

So that was the song we worked on Tuesday morning.

The song doesn’t just recount Jesus’ surrender. It also talks about our surrender to His will for our lives. The second verse says:

Because you ask me
Because you loved me first
Because you showed me how
Because my life is yours... I surrender my life to the cross

After lunch, Ronnie said he had an idea for a song called “What Kind of King?” It would just ask “What kind of king does the things Jesus did?” We spent time talking through Christ’s humility and especially the way he spent his life with the outcasts and the poor in his society. So unlike most of us. He had no need to be associated with the rich or powerful or influential. I’m so thankful for that. The first few lines say:

What kind of king prefers the weak
With sinners He sits down to eat
And lets the fallen wash His feet

We were able to finish both “Surrender To The Cross” and “What Kind of King?” on Tuesday.

Although we had set aside the whole week to write, it was actually looking like we might finish by Thursday. That what we were trying to do because of some things on Ronnie’s schedule. We were on track. We had two days and three songs to write.

how to write a musical in a week 4 days

Tue, 11 May 2010 16:17:55 -0500

PART 1 - MONDAY

There are some good reasons why Ronnie Freeman and I had to tackle this project and complete it in such a short amount of time. I won’t go into all the details, but circumstances prevented us from starting any sooner. And Ronnie had only this week open before he left for an extended period... beyond the date when an Easter musical needed to be done. So there ya go... if we were going to write something, we had this week and that was it.

We began the day Monday morning talking with Johnathan Crumpton (VP of Print and Choral) and Luke Gambill (who would oversee the project). We talked about the style and market this musical would aim for. BBMP targets different size churches, different styles of worship, big choirs, small choirs, full-time worship leaders with lots of education and part-timers who just have a passion to do something with their choir for a special occasion.

The parameters they gave us for the musical were: 1. Easter 2. Dramatic but not necessarily a drama... but a dramatic sort of feel to the songs 3. Worshipful... but not necessarily worship songs that a congregation would sing with 3. J. Daniel Smith would be doing the arrangements (In the world of musicals, the thought is that projects get chosen more often based on the arranger than on who wrote the songs.)

It might seem crazy to think you could come up with enough good song ideas for an Easter project in such a short amount of time. What I think is that the more clearly defined the demands of the project are, the easier it becomes. It’s just like this: Someone asks you to prepare a delicious dessert. OR Someone says, “Make a yellow cake with chocolate icing and decorate it for a kid’s birthday.”

Which is easier?

Ronnie had told me the week before that he had an idea for a title, and he had actually written a song that he thought we work for a title song. We listened to that in our meeting, and everybody loved it. So... Song #1 was done. It is called “Finished.” It celebrates in true Ronnie Freeman style how Jesus came and “did what had to be done” to save us. (Wish I had helped write it!)

Ronnie and I were back in our writing room with time to work for a while before he needed to leave for a couple of hours (which would be my lunch break). We spent quite a bit of time just talking. We knew we wouldn’t be writing the traditional kind of musical that told the story of Easter. There wouldn’t be a song that was a “Hosanna-Palm Sunday-triumphal entry” song. What we did decide we would try to do would be to write songs that would capture the emotions of the different events of the Passion Week.

We tackled the opening song first. It would set the stage for the whole work. The title song was not what we wanted for that moment. An opener invites people in, introduces them to the feel of the whole project, sets the stage... and often it comes back at the end of the musical and gets heard again. What would work for all of that?

A celebratory 6/8 feel? Always fun to write. Seemed like it could work for this.

Ronnie Freeman plays piano and sings, even in the writing room, with such passion that you can easily imagine a whole orchestra and a huge choir doing a song. (You also sometimes wonder if the piano might fall apart, but that’s another issue.)

We started with some historical context. How the people were watching and waiting for the Messiah. The kind of king they were looking for. The kind of king they really needed. The first four lines accomplish that.

The next four lines (a doubled first verse) tell what happened next. “Heaven answered... hope descended... on the night He took on flesh.”

And then a pre-chorus to launch us into the big celebration of the chorus. Since the chorus would basically announce “He is here,” the pre-chorus had to bridge from the waiting to the declaration.

We decided to turn to Scripture... “Blessed is He who comes in the name of the Lord!”

The song is called “No More Waiting.” It felt great for that opening slot, not only because of what it says in terms of how historically the Messiah had arrived, but also what it says for us today. We don’t have to wait. If you’re hungry or desperate or broken... Jesus is here. No more waiting! We wrote a second verse that covered the here and now.

The bridge expands on the idea of “no more.” My favorite line is “No more shame without redemption.”

Writing all of this took the rest of the morning and then more of the afternoon after lunch. We talked about how the song would feel at the end of the musical, saying those same things. It seemed like it would be a little strange to go back to the idea of the world waiting for a Messiah. We started talking about how we are waiting now for our King to return. It seemed natural to write one more verse that covered that for the end of the musical. Here’s what it says...

On the day we least expect it
Any moment we could see
Our Redeemer
Revelation
Will become reality

I think it might be the first time I’ve ever used the world “Revelation” in a song. We finished and then walked over to get Johnathan and Luke and ask them to come and listen. They loved it.

In a musical that would probably have 10 slots, we now had the opener and the closer. And we had the title song.

Three songs down. Seven to go.

my i-pad review

Tue, 4 May 2010 21:52:48 -0500

Before the i-Pad was even introduced, I was aware that it was coming and was looking forward to hearing all about it. I’m geeky that way. Most everyone who knows me, knows that I just love Apple stuff. Over the years, I have owned probably 10 different Macs, from a little Mac classic that had 1 MG of RAM and a 20 megabyte hard drive, to the 500 gigabyte hard drive that I have now on my MacBook Pro. I had an early i-Pod, and now I have my current i-Phone.

John is used to this. He is used to getting my hand-me-downs when I upgrade to something new. All along I have justified my purchases because I really do make full use of my computers. I write all my songs on them. I do everything connected with Write About Jesus... registrations, all the publicity, the layout and design for the notebook... on and on. I do believe my hands are permanently curled in the “QWERTY” position.

So... yes, I was looking forward to what the i-Pad would bring. Last year I bought a Kindle from Amazon. It was getting to the place where I had as much weight in my suitcase from books as I had from my clothes. Kindle solved that problem, and I have been an avid reader this year on it. I liked my Kindle so much, but it wasn’t perfect.

Enter the i-Pad. As soon as Steve Jobs made the presentation in January, I pretty much figured I was in. And I knew I would not be satisfied with simply getting the wi-fi version. I would want to go for the 3G with the most memory I could get. My biggest hesitation was whether I should hold out for a second generation, when maybe they would include a front facing camera. (Looks like the new i-Phone will have that... but that is an argument for another day and another blog.)

My i-Pad finally arrived last Friday. I began using it immediately. My first reactions are...

1. Getting on line is so fast on this and the display is beautiful. It’s about the size of a very large greeting card, and weighs maybe a pound.
2. When you open Safari, the pages you have been on previously are still there and you can choose from among them. You can also choose from among all your bookmarks. It’s simple to zip back and forth between Twitter and Facebook or frequently visited pages.
3. The i-Books app is beautiful. Unlike Kindle, it is backlit, and I love that. You can adjust the brightness if your eyes are getting tired. But if you want to read in the dark, you can. On the downside, there aren’t anywhere close to as many books in the i-Book store as you can get for the Kindle. The good news is that the Kindle app works just beautifully on the i-Pad, so I still have access to all my Kindle purchases.
4. Videos are gorgeous on the i-Pad. It doesn’t play Flash videos. I hope they will fix that soon, but I can live with it.
5. Email is a pleasure to read! In the vertical orientation, it is like holding a full sheet of paper. Really, it is so great, I am just loving it. And it’s fast to compose and send an email. Downloading attachments is simple, but I don’t think you can attach things to an email from the email program. You can email a photo from the photo app, and you can email a recording from that app... but not the other way around, I don’t think. And I’m pretty positive there’s not way to send multiple attachments with a single email. That will make it more complicated to email my song information, but it will still be possible in a few different ways. I’ll just have to be creative.
6. Two apps I bought right away were Pages and Numbers. I’m not a big presentation person, so I haven’t bought Keynote (similar to Power Point). But I use Pages for writing lyrics. And I sort of thought I could use Numbers in place of Filemaker Pro. I was willing to fork over $10 to see for sure, and I was not disappointed.
7. Pages on the i-Pad is great. Is it as simple and fully-featured as Pages on my MacBook Pro? No. But it’s good enough to makes me so happy to have it. I wrote my first song on Pages on my i-Pad yesterday. It was somewhat awkward and demanding. I thought about just going back to the laptop today. But then I remembered that when I first started using the trackpad on my laptop, that was annoying and awkward too. Now, using it is like second nature to me. I don’t even think about it. I figure Pages on the i-Pad will be the same way. And today, it was twice as simple as it was yesterday! I know I will continue to use it.
8. Numbers on the i-Pad... also so cool. Without reading instructions, I figured out how to set up tables so that I could replicate the Song Delivery Form that I use for turning in songs to my publisher. From that app, I can email songs to myself and to my publisher at the same time in PDF form.
9. Sunday morning I said to John, “I really want to take my i-Pad to church and use it for reading the Scripture and for notes. But I feel a little weird. I don’t want it to seem like I’m trying to call attention to myself... like ‘Hey everybody look... I have an i-Pad.’” John said, “What do you care what anybody says? Take it! That’s part of why you bought it!” So I did, and it was really great to read the Scripture and take some notes that way. But already since then, I have become so much more proficient with the keyboard, that I know I will only enjoy it more next Sunday.
10. The i-Pod app works great and it has a surprisingly big sound. I’ll still use my i-Phone for music in the car probably, but that could change.
11. I could see myself investing in the TomTom app down the road. To have turn-by-turn navigation commands would be a great plus, and I know from experience that I use the GPS feature on my i-Phone more than I ever thought I would.
12. I’m not a big game player. I have maybe 3 or 4 games that I like, including Words With Friends, which I play non-stop with several people. The games I do play are pretty cool on the i-Pad, but games wouldn’t be a reason that I would buy one. But that’s just me.
13. How will I feel if a new i-Pad comes out with a front-facing camera? I thought about this for quite a while before I ordered my i-Pad. I seldom use i-Sight for anything except writing with other people. And because i-Pad doesn’t multi-task... it’s pretty much one app at a time... unless that changes, I wouldn’t be able to i-Sight AND write too. So I will stick with my laptop for that. I did download the AIM app so that I could i-chat on it, and that is working just fine.
14. I was surprised that there were apps that came with my i-Phone that weren’t included on the i-Pad. Those included an alarm clock, a weather app, and the recorder app. But I downloaded each of those for free from the App Store.
15. The other app I downloaded free is something that both Tim Wheeler and Simon Hawkins suggested: Drop Box. With it, I can put my lyrics on Drop Box and have access to them from any of my computers. Now THAT is a great advantage! Who knows how many of my co-writers’ folders I will put in Drop Box. But I could conceivably put everyone I plan to write with during the week in it and have access to all the songs we’ve written together. I’ve already put ALL my demos and work tapes into my i-Tunes.
16. Learning stuff on the i-Pad is pretty intuitive if you are a Mac user already and especially if you have an i-Phone. I downloaded the User Guide but only because I wanted to check about attaching things to emails, not because I felt like I needed to read instructions before I could use something.
17. I worked on my i-Pad today nearly nonstop from around 9 a.m. until nearly 10 p.m. when I finally got a signal that my battery was getting low. If i can work untethered all day, every day... wow. That alone is a huge plus to me!

So, those are my reactions after less than a week. I am a happy camper. If anybody has a question, I’d be happy to answer. My biggest wish right now is that they would develop i-Web for the i-Pad. That way I could be writing this blog from there!