Hear Sojourn Working On Another New Song For Our Upcoming Worship CD: “We Are Changed.”

Recording sessions continue for the first of our two upcoming worship CDs based on the hymns of Isaac Watts.  I’ll tell you a little bit about this latest song in a minute but first:

in the video to follow, producer Neil Robins works with drummer Ryan Harvey to record the percussion track for a song that Neil, Dave Moisan and I wrote together called “We Are Changed.”  You’ll see Neil at the mix board, listening to the cut and then, when this portion of the song ends, giving direction to Ryan through a microphone (Ryan is downstairs in the orchestra room).

Below — and after having been warned in the video above that I was coming downstairs to record him — Ryan plays drums while listening to the track in his headset.  As I understand it, he hasn’t even been drumming for very long and this is his first big recording.  He’s a natural:

“We Are Changed” is a songwriting collaboration between Neil Robins, Dave Moisan and me (of course, Isaac Watts as well).  I gave Neil my lyrics, adapted from Watts’ common meter hymn “Not all the outward forms on earth” (also sometimes known as “Regeneration” or “Utter Helplessness”).

Watts based the hymn on John 1:13

children born not of natural descent, nor of human decision or a husband’s will, but born of God.

My alteration basically amounts to a few “modernized” lyric updates and, more importantly, the addition of a chorus.  The chorus gives “We Are Changed” a more modern song structure, but my main reason for adding the chorus was to broaden the theme, to highlight Christ’s atoning role in our new birth.  I wanted the triune nature of God on display and I wanted the sacrifice of Calvary to be prominent.

Neil and Dave, who wrote the melody together, took it even further by turning the first part of my chorus (“through Your Spirit, through Your sacrificial Son”) into a prechorus, musically, and then expanding on my original chorus with some great lines.  It was an honor to share this project with them.

To give you an example of changes made to the Watts text besides the addition of the prechorus and chorus:

• Where Watts’ had “not all the outward forms on earth, nor rites that God has given,” I changed it to “not any government on earth, no law that God has given.”  You can hear this at the beginning of the video above.

I think my reason for this is clear — the English language has changed since the early 18th century.  I wanted the lyrics to be accessible to everyone.

• At an earlier point in the song than was recorded in the video above, Dave sings “born in the image of His Son, a chosen, holy race” rather than Watts’ “Born in the image of His Son, a new, peculiar race”

Again, I changed this to make it more accessible to modern audiences.  Another reason was that I liked the “long O” internal rhyme in “chosen, holy”.

We changed a few more small things here and there, for similar reasons.  The music that Dave and Neil came up with was something that Watts couldn’t have envisioned, either.  We hope he doesn’t box our ears when he sees us in heaven.

Seriously, as with all the songs, the Sojourn writers consider it to be a privilege and a grave responsibility to interpret, for our place and time, some of the greatest, most biblically-saturated hymns ever given to Christ’s church.  And we’ll share many more of our interpretations with you in the weeks and months to come.

For now, you can watch additional footage of this recording session at our Myspace and Facebook pages, which you can reach any time from the Helpful Links section of sojournmusic.com.  Also, you can download the first of the two videos above from our Sojournmusic.com Radio podcast if you’d like, available for free on iTunes and other podcast directories.  You can also watch all these videos from my personal YouTube page.  Feel free to embed any of the videos into your own blogs, social network pages and websites.

See Producer Neil Robins Working With Sojourn Musicians On The Song “Refuge”

Hear Parts Of The Demo For “Refuge” and Rough Mix Of “Over Death”