Silent Night 🎵
Song Stories
It's time I started giving you my back catalogue!
I thought you might like to know a bit more about the songs I write and record. Why do I make certain choices? Why do I feel a song is important enough to put work into, and how do I know when it is done (hint: they're never done)? Consider this series; Song Stories, the place for those answers, lyrics and more.
Silent Night
Released December 2016
This track has it's beginnings in my 'day job'. A few years ago I was working for Hope Mission, a homeless shelter and soup kitchen here in Edmonton. They serve hundreds of meals every day, but the holiday meals are the biggest. My job was communications. I did website updates, graphic design and writing for the fundraising department. I also made videos.
I was making a video to give a 'taste' of Hope Mission's holiday meals to those weren't there – and a memory for those who were. I needed the perfect track and we didn't have a music budget. So I decided to take on the challenge and record the music myself. I had recently got my (then-new) Danelectro electric guitar and was in love with the reverb-soaked tones my (now-stolen) vintage Garnet amp was giving me. I was looking for a song that was free of copyright restrictions and was instantly recognizable, without the lyrics. Silent Night is just such a song.
Watch the video at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Q0UuxwgVMw
It was a couple of years later that I took that rough instrumental version and decided to work it into a full-fledged Christmas cover. Christmas can be a boon for developing artists like me because people are often looking for a good new version of a classic song, and they'll listen to yours when they'd never be exposed to your music otherwise.
Unlike my debut EP, I didn't have a lot of time to record different bits in different locations with different microphones, so Silent Night was done in my basement, with just one microphone and some fake 'robot' drums in my recording software, Logic Pro X.
I remain happy with this version and bring it out around the holidays for my live shows. I'll be doing that tonight, in fact.
Silent Night is available to stream on Spotify and Apple Music, or you can purchase it for your library on iTunes.
Of course, if you're reading this, you just got it for free because you're a Patron and you're awesome!