Restore America Theme | A Song For Ron Paul 2012

I wrote and recorded this rather quickly, but here it is anyway.

 

Update

I am currently working with three other musicians on a short (eight song) album for Grace Church Bristol. It will be done by around August of this year. More updates to come in the future.

 

Ephesians Project Music Player!

I have began to experiment with Sound Cloud in order to work on the Ephesians Project. Part of that has yielded an easy media player for the project. Feel free to listen to these tracks or download them:

 

Status of Ecclesiastes Album: Wisdom, Madness and Folly

My current solo work: Wisdom, Madness and Folly – an album written to explore and probe the book of Ecclesiastes chapter by chapter – is still at about the 80% mark. Because of my work for Grace Church Bristol’s Ephesians Project, and my full-time life(!), I simply haven’t had the evening and weekend time to finish the last little bits to get this things banged out. I am confident that I will have time early on in the new year to work this out – but when that comes is undefined.

One benefit of this, is that the album is getting far more scrutiny than the last two efforts (Honour and Light Burden). But also, this extra time has enabled relationships and opportunities to develop with musicians and other music aficionados to tremendously benefit this album. My last two works were done, with the exception of the mastering help of Erik Sather, entirely on my own. This album will have several more collaborators – and these people are incredible!

 

More Ephesians Project Songs

This post summarises the Ephesians memory verse songs thus far released as part of Grace Church Bristol’s Ephesians Project. For those unaware, I am currently coordinating this project – putting together original songs, musicians and word-for-word scripture into a set of songs which will help people memorise the book of Ephesians.

Here are the songs so far:

1. Before the Foundations of the World (Eph 1:3-6)
   Written by Colin Elliott, Lead Vocals by Colin Elliott
2. An Inheritance in Him (Eph 1:11)
   Written by Colin Elliott, Lead Vocals by Angi Sussex
3. To the Praise of His Glory (Eph 1:13-14)
   Written by Colin Elliott, Lead Vocals by Colin Elliott
4. Remembering You in All My Prayers (Eph 1:15-17)
   Written by Colin Elliott, Lead Vocals by Colin Elliott
5. By Grace You’ve Been Saved (Eph 2:1-8)
   Written by Jadie Stiven, Lead Vocals by Jadie Stiven
6. Grace Through Faith (Eph 2:9-10)
   Written by Colin Elliott, Lead Vocals by Angi Sussex

There are many more songs to come of course. It is my expectation that these and additional songs will be released sometime around summer of 2009 as a CD. I’ll keep you posted.

 

Ephesians Project: First Song Released

Grace Church Bristol has posted the first song off the Ephesians Project. It’s called “Before the Foundations of The World” and covers chapter 1:3-6.  Here is the info:

Lead vocal: Colin Elliott
Backing vocal: Angi Sussex
Guitars: Colin Elliott
Mandolin: Colin Elliott
Violin: Jo Dyer
Trumpets: Nathan Randell
Euphonium: Nathan Randell
Clarinet: Sarah O’Driscol
Bass: Andy Maybury

Recorded at Curiosity Cottage, Whitchurch, Bristol, UK. Produced by Colin Elliott. Written by Colin Elliott. Text is from ESV.

It’s incredible to see what the musicians did with a song that started with just a guitar and a vocal – turning it into a multi-layered piece, with brass, strings and additional vocals.

 

More Multi-Tasking: Ephesians Project at Grace Church

Among the many benefits of being a member of Grace Church Bristol – great teaching, sound and purposeful fellowship, passionate worship, a humble adherence to biblical theology – I now have the privilege of directing a scripture-to-music project focusing on Ephesians.

The goal is to put the words directly to music – no paraphrasing or improvising – straight out of the bible. We’re hoping that it will help:

• Aid in scripture memorisation
• Support our pastor’s teaching through the book
• Get more people involved in the musical portions of Grace Church
• Create a useful tool for non-Grace Church blog/website readers

There have been a lot of people showing interest, and it’s really exciting to see things coming together. Several people who don’t normally do worship have come forward to add orchestral instruments, a couple have donated their living room for recording and people are even challenging themselves with new efforts – such as writing songs or singing.

It’ll be interesting to see what happens to the simple demos that I’ve sent out to people – I expect the finished product will be amazingly different!

 

Fixed Poor Music Links

I realise that some may have had trouble with some of the music links. I believe I have no fixed this problem and all of the music should now be available.

 

New Song: Methusela

As part of an aside this last week, I challenged myself to an “impromptu” recording. I asked a Smashing Pumpkins forum to nominate a song for me to redo and record in one week. They chose “Methusela” – a 1995 demo that was never actually recorded in the studio.

This is what I came up with: Methusela (Smashing Pumpkins cover)

In some ways, this previews the style of the Wisdom, Madness and Folly record that I am working on now – orchestra and electronics combined into a loose “rock” style. It also says something about the arrangements, which are going to be more linear – that is moving a song from A to B to C to D, rather than the typical verse, chorus, verse, chorus, bridge, quiet chorus, chorus.

 

An Ephesians Aside

In August-ish, I am going to be helping my church out with a CD of merory songs for Ephesians. Unlike the Ecclesiastes project, these will be pretty stripped down musically, and also will be ported straight out of the biblical text. They are to help in memorisation of key passages of Ephesians, and that’s it. Anyway, I’ll post those here as they come. I expect to be writing a lot of the material and also performing on some of it.