Leaving The Old Life Behind (inside scoop)

If you have watched any of my videos (to the end), you know that I am not a subscriber to the idea that we must not show flaws, much less publicize them. I believe you cannot claim humility if you cannot laugh at yourself! So, here’s the Scoop…

The first step in the process of recording an album is picking the songs and laying down “click tracks.” A click track is the vocal sung to a metronome or click (helps keep the tempo). This provides a reference to add the instruments. Once all the instruments are recorded, the final vocals are recorded. Since the click track is temporary, it doesn’t need to be perfect.

After several hours of picking songs and laying down click tracks, it was time to choose the final song. We had several to choose from. As soon as I sang “Leaving the Old Life Behind,” my music producer, Michael Crittenden, said, “That’s it! That’s the one!”

Being quite tired by this point, I started singing… and lost track of the lyrics and laughed at myself. After playing this track for some of his family and friends, Michael said the laugh was “endearing,” helping people connect with me on a more human level. We all agreed the laugh should somehow be part of the song but we couldn’t leave it in the middle of the lyrics.

That said, laughter was a necessary ingredient in the production of Worship Through Song, and Michael loved to leave the recording going just so he could capture it. We used one of these recorded spontaneous laughs at the end of the song to maintain the feeling brought out by the original.

Breaking another rule, here is the excerpt from the original recording, “Blooper” and all.