Here With You: A Liturgy of Journey and Experience

Description

Here With You: A Liturgy of Journey and Experience is an album by the American singer and songwriter Wade Baynham, self-released in August 2019. This project was created during 2018 and 2019 at The Second Story in Durham, North Carolina. Featuring a cover of “The Dry Bones Dance”, a song written by Mark Heard and originally recorded on his 1990-album by the same title.

I really enjoy recording music – at least most of the time, and I’ve had the privilege of playing and recording quite a bit of music over the years. But I felt a bit lost part way through this group of songs. I wasn’t sure I liked what I had been recording, and I had no idea if the songs fit together. I knew that I was very moved by the material, but at the same time, I wasn’t sure my work on the songs was going anywhere.

I don’t like feeling lost, but I’ve been through this process enough to know that it’s not always a bad thing, and that some of my most creative moments have come as a result of working through a lack of confidence and direction. There is something for me about sitting in the frustration and fear of failure, that is followed by giving up – or more a ‘giving in’ to the process of creativity that has allowed new ideas and ways of working to emerge.

This group of songs did slowly began to feel like a coherent collection as I showed up in the studio to work, day after day. The ability to record music with software rather than on tape or other older formats has given many of us the chance to record for a while, and then sit and reflect, in ways that weren’t possible when I first started making records. In those days of tape machines and big mixing desks with limited automation, true reflection on the work in process was a scarce luxury for many of us making music. Now, I can record parts on a song and then put it away – for weeks if need be, and then come back to pick up right where I left off, to delve deeper or throw out and start afresh.

So, as I continued to record, reflect on and revise these songs, they eventually came through their awkward teenage stages and became a type of liturgy for me – in the plainest sense, common words of the people, meant to be sung and spoken together for encouragement, reflection, hope, connection and communion. The songs began to give back to me.

I can’t pretend to know what someone else is looking for when they listen to music. The way that I try to make music is to do my best to make the kind of music that I would really like to listen to. I try to make music that encourages and inspires me, and I hope it might do the same for you as you listen, hum, or sing along. My hope is that this music can be ‘Here With You’ as you listen and participate in your own way, and that together we can encourage each other in this shared journey of life.

By the way, if you’d like to know more about these tracks, you can click on the individual songs, and you will be directed to an individual page for that song where I have written more about each one.

Thank you for taking some time to check out my music.

– Wade Baynham

CD tracklist:

01. Never-Ending Road – 5:19
02. Chiquitita – 5:31
03. Wayfaring Stranger – 5:15
04. Strength of My Life – 5:38
05. Lean on Me – 4:09
06. The Dry Bones Dance – 5:27
07. The Maid That Sold Her Barley – 3:10
08. Limelight – 4:36
09. Wedding Song (There is Love) – 4:27
10. If I Stand – 4:44
11. Show Me the River – 3:55

Note: Available at bandcamp: https://wadebaynham.bandcamp.com/album/here-with-you-a-liturgy-of-journey-and-experience