All right, folks, this is the part I’ve been excited about. I hope you are, too.

Last year it was a crazy experiment. This time we know it will probably work. So I’m adding another level of interesting. I’ll get to that in a minute.

It’s time to see if we can pull off another round of webground® vocals!

What I have here is a zip file you can download. In it are some mp3s and instructions. If you have GarageBand or ProTools or Logic or Cakewalk or some sort of audio recording program you should be able to make this work. There are the backing tracks of the song and then separate tracks of the parts I need you to sing. Or play.

And by play I mean, play your instrument. Whatever instrument you do play. Acoustic guitar, flute, tuba, accordian, cello, etc… As long as you play either the chords or the main melody (which are provided for you) I’ll fit you in somehow. And this will be crazy, and really might not work. But if it does, which I’m betting on, it could be awesome.

So click the link below and be a part of this project.

webgrounds

This kind of stuff is so fun. I wish I could do this every day, but then it might get old… Either way, I’m honored that people were a part of this last year, and I’ve been glad to see folks have asked to do it again. It’s a thrill to hear your voices and to make this music together.

You’re amazing and I hope you guys have a great time with this.

Ok, Let’s Get Webgrounded®!!!

(Special thanks to Mike Allard, who made a PDF of the included instructions, since my Microsoft Word apparently has some virus. This just goes to show: Bill Gates hates webground® vocals. Thanks Mike!)

Well, today may have just been incredibly productive. Last night, before I went to bed, I had an idea for song #5 of the Letters 2 EP. Today I was able to finish it. And tonight I think I just wrote the final tune. It’s ten minutes old right now, so it may not totally there, time will tell. I have to find time to record them still, hopefully I can get to it by the end of the week. I’ll keep you posted.

The song I just finished takes cues in the verses from what folks sent in, but the chorus is pretty much the story of my last year and a moment I had this past week in Canada. At the end of our time together we were taking communion, and we spent a good bit of time in silent confession.

Now, it doesn’t take too many listens of the Normals catalog to know I’m pretty hard on myself. But this time, as a bunch of things crashed together inside of me, I began confessing completely different things. Stories I’ve never written. Songs I’ve never finished. Ideas of things to do in the studio that I never got around to. Ideas Alison had that I never fully thought through.

In short, I started confessing for not being who I was meant to be, for not doing the things I love. I was confessing for hiding my passions and gifts because they scared me, or I thought they’d scare other folks, or who knows why… And not only that, I was just confessing what the things were, because I had forgotten…

If I believe that God created me uniquely, and that He gave me these ideas, talents, perspectives, then it’s worth confessing that I’ve not lived them fully.

This “confession” left me feeling more free than I have been few times since I was a child. I almost choked on the bread and wine I took it so fast.

Lord, help me remember. Give me the strength, patience and vision to be who you’ve created me to be, and to enjoy finding who that is.

I’ve spent the past two weeks mainly out of the studio and not playing shows, and have been instead with my family and some close friends. I’ve also met some new friends.

This past week six of my Nashville buddies and I went up to British Columbia, Canada and attended a retreat. We were part of a group of about 25 artists from different disciplines; a few musicians, a few authors, some filmmakers, a photographer, a clothing designer… It was a wonderful time. My good friend Al spoke, and it was amazingly insightful and impacting.

The most profound things we saw, though, were the lives of our hosts, the Goff family, whose lodge was used for our time. They served us in incredibly thought-out and beautiful ways, and hearing their story and watching them live it is causing me to really think about my own life, and what it might need to start looking like.

You can see from yourself, this is a half-hour of Bob Goff speaking at Anderson University last year. Keep in mind, he never “spoke” to us, he just shuttled us around, swapped stories with us, asked questions and listened. His family made us amazing meals and welcomed us completely, making it possible for a bunch of artists to spend time in a beautiful place to think and listen to Jesus.

And the week before I went to this retreat my family and I were back at home in Illinois, where my brother provided me with this same type of inspiration. CLICK THIS and see what he’s been up to.

So the questions I have to ask myself:

- What am I doing about my faith?

- What dreams has God put inside me should I pull out of the “Crazy” pile and start looking at again?

- If my life is not about my job and my status, what is it about?

How about you?

I’m sitting on my couch, keeping one eye on the driveway. Any minute Randall and Christopher will be here to pick me up. We’re going to hop on a plane to Seattle, then head up to Vancouver, then get on a boat to take us 100 miles up the inlets to my favorite place on Earth. Really. It’s my favorite.

There’s a lodge right down the boardwalk from a YoungLife camp called Malibu up there, and we’re going to be part of a small artist retreat hosted by Donald Miller. I’m really looking forward to it. A few of my close friends are going besides Randall and Christopher, I’m excited to meet the other artists in attendance, and again, it’s my favorite place on Earth.

I’ll take pictures.

Alison and the girls headed out yesterday morning to North Carolina and are now currently at the beach with her parents. Pretty nice. I’ve been bachelor for a day and a half now, so I did what comes naturally. I stayed at the studio until 4 am working on Letters 2. It was great.

They’re here. See you guys later.

I stole this from a Wendy’s. I just like to enjoy looking at the knowledge that the new shakes are actually made with ingredients. What was in the old ones?

The Osengas are back home in Nashville today. The Osenglets, i.e. the little ones, are sweaty and ripe from being outside in the Sheol temperature/humidity of the Urban South. And it’s good to be here.

This past weekend was a long overdue, very good trip back to my hometown. We caught up with some old friends, the Grandparents got to do their spoiling and showing off, and all in all it was good.

Caedmon’s had a show Sunday about an hour from Normal. Actually two shows, one at 5 and one at 8. Very odd. And of course the one at 8 was way better and of course the one at 5 was a mini-high school reunion for me.

There’s nothing quite like taking a guitar solo in front of the guy who taught you to play, especially when that teacher was Mark Lockett. Gulp. But it seemed to go all right, from that end. The shows were fun, though my nerves were high.

I also read the uber-bestseller book “Twilight”, and I’d like those hours of my life back. In case you’re thinking of reading it, here’s the book in four sentences. Because the book was basically these four, and ONLY these four, in various forms for 500 pages. Spoiler Alert, if you care. Which you shouldn’t.

“I love you. You’re perfect.”

“Yes, you are. And I love you. And I’ll hurt you. And I am perfect.”

Scene.

So now I’m back home, typing a blog while the sweaty Osenglets are putting Dora stickers on my laptop. “Yes, I’d love a ripped-off Boots’ head. Put it right here.” Today and tomorrow are catch-up, cleaning and laundry and getting ready for the ladies to go to North Carolina and for me to go to Canada for an artist retreat. More on that later. I’ve made some more progress on writing with Letters 2, but haven’t been able to record. Hopefully Friday, when I’ll be a bachelor for a day.

So there we are in a nutshell. Thanks to everybody who came out to see the band play Sunday, hope you enjoyed it. Oh, and thanks to Illinois for having good pizza. There’s no Nashville comparison. Not even close.

Nothing says “Happy Anniversary” quite like sleeping in your parents’ basement and taking your family with you to work, but that’s what’s happening today.

My girls and I are in Normal, IL, my hometown. Caedmon’s is playing today in Decatur, a town nearby, so this weekend we packed up the little ladies and drove up to visit my family and friends here.

We’ve been having a good time, seeing how much more fun there is to be had here (water parks, cheese farms, etc…) than there was when I was growing up. The girls are being spoiled by their grandparents and we’re getting to sleep in a little. Not a bad deal.

And yes, today Alison and I have been married for six years. I’m a lucky man. Tomorrow we’ll actually get to celebrate it, but today we get to be together, and that’s enough for me.

Spent the day writing for Letters 2. An incredibly rich day. A friend loaned me a book last week and he read this paragraph aloud to me as he did so, and it’s very deeply informed my writing today.

“I have come to believe that by and large the human family all has the same secrets, which are both very telling and very important to tell. They are telling in the sense that they tell what is perhaps the central paradox of our condition - that what we hunger for perhaps more than anything else is to be known in our full humanness, and yet that is often just what we also fear more than anything else.”

- Frederick Buechner (from the book Telling Secrets)

There’s a quote I’ve been trying to find for a week now. I can’t remember where I read it, or who said it, but I’d like to get it right and give them credit.

There was so much hype for the new Batman movie and I was all caught up in it, but walking out of the theatre, my thoughts turned to this quote. (If you are familiar with it and can direct me towards the original, I’d appreciate it.)

“There comes a point when one must say of all the things of man, of Shakespeare, even of Mozart, is this all?”

Is this all? Hundreds of millions of dollars, IMAX film, great writing and visuals, some of the best actors alive, and even the haunting power of a final performance, and you know what? It was just a movie. We gave our money, ate our popcorn, and headed back out to the parking lot to drive home and see who was on Conan.

Not that it wasn’t a good movie. It was. But it revealed to me, (again and again, will I never learn?) that I put my hope in the wrong things.

Was I really putting my hope in some movie, you might say? Hoping it would do do what? I don’t know, honestly, but I do know I was disappointed that I wasn’t different after watching it, that it hadn’t changed me. Which means, at some absurd and obviously flawed level, I was putting my hope in a movie.

And this is something we all do. Whether it’s Batman or the new Coldplay or U2. We can put our hope there. Or we can put it in our pastor’s sermons or our small group’s honesty. We can put our hope there. We can put it in the girl that got away or in making love with the one we married. We can put our hope there.

We have some bit of hope that it will change us, make us better. Or we’re trapped in some cycle of secrets and habits we can’t escape. Maybe this thing will curb our appetite for the sins that we feel define our secret selves, or at least it will let us not think about it for a while. Or at least it will make us feel. We’ve been so numbed for so long, for some unknown and hated reason, that we can’t feel anymore, and maybe this thing will connect us, revive us.

And at some point we’ll have to look at this thing, this movie or relationship or feeling, however truly good it may be, and say: “is this all?”

In a word: “Oops.”