This was a project that I started with the onset of COVID and had intended to produce and release to the various streaming platforms. I was playing with my band at that time (Bobby Fleet!) and I wanted to focus some of that energy toward a more personally meaningful subject — to give honor to the people and places that have made me who I am. I’ve since left those musical pursuits behind to focus on more serious musical compositions and liturgical studies. I leave this here for what it is — a monument to my past.
This project was born out of a reminder of our mortality. My mother passed away in 2019, and my father in 2023. Friends from childhood have also passed. All causing me to reflect on our shared lives, what is noble, what is meaningful, and the people that have lived their lives to give me the life that I now have. I’ve written these songs to reflect those sentiments.
First, is the song about my grandmother, Alberta, when she was just a child growing up in the dust-bowl stricken panhandle of Oklahoma (Alberta’s Song). Then, there is the song about my own childhood growing up in the quintessential small town of Winfield, Kansas (Summertime in Kansas).
On the occasion of the sudden and unexpected death of one of my friends from high school, I recorded the song “Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door” in a hotel room in Modesto, CA while on a business trip. Then, there is a song about the struggle of the farmer, surviving summer heat and drought, always dependent on the Lord for his sustenance (Dust of the Devil). There is the song about the deadliest Tornado in Oklahoma’s history (Glazier Higgins Woodward) which swept through the panhandle of Texas, Oklahoma, and into south-central Kansas — where my family is from — and left a lasting impression of the realities of life and our inability to control them — for decades to come. And finally, there is the song about second chances (Second Chance) that speaks of God’s superabundant grace and mercy that gives us what we least deserve in spite of ourselves. Too many stories could be used to illustrate that point from my own experience or from my family. You probably have your own, so I’ll leave it there.
These songs all somehow fit together to give a picture of the people and life that we shared in rural Texas, Oklahoma, and Kansas, where I grew up and now live, at least that was my intention.
These songs will never find their way to Spotify or iTunes, but I leave them here as a reminder and a continuous memorial for the good things that they intend, and a reminder — that we are dust.