So I was on the mission field and realized that God wanted me to go to seminary.
All that time after I became a Christian, I was carrying around an acoustic guitar and writing songs. I have over 300 songs. I think they are on that song list I finally organized over the years. I even had to type the lyrics. I had a person help me type out the lyrics and put them into a book, and I have kept reorganizing it several times.
So I was writing songs. I was experiencing life and being at seminary.
One day, I was down at the Bloomington, Minnesota public library, and I think the Holy Spirit led me over to a very interesting part of the library. They were checking out four-track studios.
It was a little box. A little plastic box with four inputs, a bunch of knobs, and a cassette holder. I think it was a little Roland or something. I do not remember for sure. It was black.
I could not believe the public library was checking out four-track recording devices.
So I took it back to my little room.
I had a microphone somewhere. It was a RadioShack condenser microphone. I would put that microphone down inside the 12-string dreadnought, literally down inside it, and I had another microphone I would sing into. Maybe I just used the same microphone. I do not remember all of that exactly.
I would make my own tapes so that my music was easier for me to listen to, because I listened to my own songs.
My songs were kind of like David in the Old Testament, where it says he consoled himself in the Lord. Basically, that is what I was doing.
I was writing songs. Some of them were evangelistic. Some were praise songs. Some were just me and life.
All of these years, I had cassette tapes, and I would give them out here and there to people. Looking back, I do not believe there were very many people who really appreciated them. Probably because they were so personal to me. I had learned to write in a style that was basically just for myself.
I would give someone a tape with several songs on it and ask what they thought.
They would say, “Oh, this is good. I liked it.”
But they were not really very interested in it.
And I understand why. This was the cassette tape era. The cassette tapes sitting next to mine were highly produced, very polished, with million-dollar voices. Why would anyone want to listen to my four-track demo that I made on a four-track checked out from the public library?
It was just a guy singing and playing guitar.
The lyrics, the playing, and the structure of the song may have been pretty good, but still, the polish is why people did not listen to it.
Nevertheless, probably about fifty people out there had my old cassettes. They have probably been thrown away long ago.
Seminary is where I began to put a lot of my Christian music down onto four-track. That is where I began to compile an archive of my old music. From around 1988 and beyond, most of the songs were recorded on some kind of four-track device, and I had my hands on several of them.
During my three years in Minnesota, I had access to a four-track recorder, and I had access to a grand piano — a little baby concert grand piano that was in the church.
I convinced the person who was in charge of maintenance to get me a copy of the key to the church sanctuary. Whenever I wanted to, even in the middle of the night, I could go down to the church sanctuary when everybody was asleep and play that baby concert grand piano.
It was a magnificent piano.
Let me tell you, to have an instrument of that quality makes a difference.
So I was at seminary, and I had access to a four-track recording studio anytime I wanted. I also had times when I could be alone, and I had that piano in the sanctuary.
A friend reminded me once that I had a bunch of new songs, and I needed to get into a house alone for a vacation. I borrowed somebody’s cabin. It belonged to the parents of a friend of mine from college. She worked in administration. She was not a student.
So I borrowed her parents’ cottage out in the middle of Minnesota, in the forest.
I took that four-track recording studio because everybody else was going to be leaving on vacation. I went up into that cottage to record one of my albums, which I think was called The Wind.
All these albums have their history, and all the songs have their history. But this was a significant group of songs that I really felt like I wanted to get down on four-track well. I needed to be alone for several days.
I was talking to a friend the other day because I was sending him one of my songs made by AI, and he said, “Wow, this is amazing. Is this one of your songs that you did up in Jana Anderson’s cabin when the snowstorm hit?”
And I said, “What do you mean? I don’t remember the snowstorm.”
He said, “Oh yeah, you were stranded up in that cabin because a massive snowstorm had come in. We were worried you weren’t going to live. We had to get a four-wheel-drive Jeep to get up into the woods and get you out of there, because we thought you would be trapped and would not have any food and water.”
I do not even remember this. He was reminding me of it.
So during those three years of seminary, I was about twenty-six, twenty-seven, twenty-eight years old. I had been playing guitar since I was sixteen. I had been writing music since I was sixteen. I had been writing poetry even longer, and I had been playing musical instruments longer than that.
By then, I had also learned how to mix and record on four-track devices.
So I was at the beginning of what I would call the prime of writing really emotional, really deep, really impactful music for me. To me, it was the most emotional, impactful, and deep.
A lot of the music that I later compiled into the album Convincing comes out of that time. Also, a lot of the music from Wonders and Mysteries comes out of that time. That music is now connected to Ailie Mae.
Most of that music came out of that time because I had time to do it. I had the ability to be alone, or to do it in my dorm room, and I had access to a four-track recording studio.
That is kind of the three years of seminary.
I should also mention that I met a girl. She was a year behind me in seminary. She had come in as a new student. I was in my second year, maybe my third. I do not remember exactly.
But basically, I handed her my heart, beating, in my open hand.
And she stomped on it with her boots.
And those are the kind of boots that one of these days are going to walk all over you kind of boots.
Nevertheless, those are some of my best songs, at least my best love songs, because I wrote love songs to her.
I thank God for her because those are some good love songs.
All of the songs that came out of the heartbreak, and the praise and worship songs, and the songs to my daddy — which is a whole album, by the way, an older album called Songs for My Daddy — all of that came out of that season.
So I have to take my hat off to that girl.
Probably a good twenty-five percent of my best stuff came from her. So thank you. God bless.