As you may know, we will be recording our next worship album live this July. Joining us will be Kent Henry, who is…what else can I say? The man? Yes, the man. I’m pretty bad at documenting things for memory sake so I figure blogging (regularly) is one way to do that with this project. As of now we’re about a month away from the live tracking dates and are whittling down song choice and arrangements. With 3 days of recording, we’ll probably have two album’s worth of material, and mostly originals at that.

One of the main differences this time around is all the pre-production we’ll be doing before the tracking dates. I’m not the most musically creative person, so it’s helpful (and very stress-relieving) for me to bounce arrangement ideas off of some of our younger guys. There’s also a big advantage to doing the recording at our church…we can all go home after each session, stay well-rested, and play in a familiar environment and worship with a congregation we are with every week. Plus it won’t be -3 degrees outside, like it was when we tracked our last album In Our Day in northern NY during a January.

So far we’ve rehearsed and arranged tunes that some of our other worship leaders, Pastor Eric Peoples and Sarah Warner, will be leading. Next week we start hashing out arrangements for some of our original tunes by me, Josh Orbea (of Light the City fame), and Josh Frederich. One of my favorite songs we’ll be tracking is by Elijah Orbea (also of Light the City fame), his brother Josh, and the other Josh called This is What You Gave. Elijah led this song a few months ago at the Awakening Youth Conference in Rhode Island with about 1,000 youth and it was insane (in a good way). All I could do (besides worship) was cheer them on because our youth team from Merge Ahead was up there doing what they do every other week…abandoning themselves to God and encouraging others to follow. So so proud.

Keep up to date with us as we go through these final weeks…you can subscribe to this blog or follow us on Twitter (@mikekimmusic, @joshorbea, @elijahorbea, @clivinggod).

Here’s the schedule:

July 29 – 7:00 p.m.

July 30 – 7:00 p.m.

July 31 – 10:30 a.m.

Church of the Living God in Manchester, CT. Hope to see you there!