Wednesday, February 25, 2009

VOTE VOTE VOTE

Not for American Idol.

For me!!!!

I'm nominated for New Artist of the Year at the Dove Awards and this year, everyone in the world can have a hand in voting! You, my friends (and cyber acquaintances) can vote for me, and I am asking you to.

Go to gospelmusichannel.com and look for the Dove Award voting and then vote for me for New Artist of the Year!

Do it and do it often!

Thanks! Let's get a victory together.

Monday, February 23, 2009

Busy Busy Busy

So, life has been busy. Understatement. For sure.

I need to do better of staying in touch.

I've been writing. A lot. In March I've already got 12 writing sessions on top of about 10 shows. Plus I'm writing for my record....which is going really well, by the way.

I had about 20 songs written for the next record plus Requiem. Over the last few weeks, we were deciding who would co-produce album #2 with me. We talked with several different guys but finally came to 2 guys who will co-produce with me: Derek Webb and Don Chaffer. Derek is a solo artist who used to be part of the band Caedmon's Call. Don is the lead singer of the band Waterdeep. Don is also the guy who wrote the song "You are So Good to Me" that was a big worship hit for Third Day a while back.

Both of these guys have a huge rep for being true artists, so I think my goal of making a more artistic record has become much closer to a reality. I'm really excited about them working on my record!

Um..what else?

I guess not much else...just lots of writing!

Thursday, February 05, 2009

Requiem

So - a while back I told you guys about the Requiem I had written. A little explanation...

When I studied classical music in college, I really became entranced by composers. I wanted to be a composer. In a way, I guess am, though my compositions are different than classical composers. But when I studied those composers, I found that nearly all of them wrote Requiem masses. The reason why they did this was they were normally hired by rich people who, when a friend or family member died, would honor the dead by paying famous composers to write a great musical piece using the text from the Requiem Mass.

Over those years, I studied and sang many performances of Requiem masses and have always thought it would be cool to write one of my own. Now, that I'm in the pop/rock category, I thought it would be even cooler to write a pop/rock Requiem.

So, I took the Latin text, found several different translations and proceeded to either write songs based on the text or wrote songs using the text directly. The text is simply Scripture or adaptations of Scripture, so it was cool to dig in and try to write songs that both fit my theological place in life now and stayed true to the text.

Catholic doctrine is different in some places than what I believe, so the one text that pretty specifically spoke of Purgatory, I wrote a song based on the ideas of the text, instead of quoting the text directly.

The real recordings will have chamber orchestra and boy's choir, and they will of course sound better than the demos...but the demos I did a while back ended up very nice, I think.

Anyway, I've put the entire Requiem up over at myspace.com/chrisslighproductions.

Go, listen and let me know what you think...