If you’ve been around LCBC the past few weekends, then you’ve probably been apart of singing a song called Almighty. The chorus goes something like “Holy Holy, You Are God Almighty, Heaven and Earth, Tell of Your Glory”. (This would have worked a lot better had someone been singing the melody for you while you read those words). I thought I would give you a little bit of the back-story on the songwriting process for this song. Through a series of posts you’ll be able to see the progression this song took from creation to completion.

The journey of a song is an interesting thing. Sometimes songwriting is like a short trip around the block, it happens quickly, without much effort. Other times it’s like traveling across country, taking much more time and energy. There is no right approach. There is no magic formula. Here is the story of Almighty.

Phase 1- Musical Creation

It was late one Monday evening and a few of us were just putting the finishing touches on a band rehearsal. After much deliberation, Jordan Mellinger, Caleb Allensworth and myself decided to stay after practice and make an attempt to write music. To be honest, we were all tired and just wanted to go home. To be real honest, we didn’t want to waste our time and energy if the end result was a bad song! Despite how we felt, we knew creativity takes discipline. So, we chose to stay and write. We chose discipline.

We set out on the songwriting journey with a few simple goals:

• Let’s write a rock song
• Let’s keep it simple
• Let’s have it focus on “who God is”
• Let’s write something that we like

There was nothing really earth shattering about the goals, but it gave us a common direction and vision.  Over the next hour or so we toiled over chords, phrases, beats, melody’s, arrangements and all the other good stuff that gets talked about when 3 people try to write a song together. It was basically like throwing giant amounts of paint on a canvas to see what would stick. Some of the colors worked, some of them didn’t. Some needed to be refined, others were ready to be apart of the final work.

It was musical creation.

At the end of the night we walked away with nothing even close to a finished product. We had solid chord progressions, a good groove/feel, a cohesive arrangement and a few melodies. But we literally had no lyrics. I actually spent most of the night singing gibberish into the microphone! Even though the song was in a state of infancy, we were all excited about the possibilities. It was worth the time we invested. It was worth the choice to stay and write.

So, a simple question for you. Are you making time to create? Not all of us write songs, but we all have the ability to create something. It’s in our nature as human beings to be creative. Too often we don’t make the time or space for it happen. Often we worry about the end result, and that keeps us from even beginning the creative process.

Choose creative discipline. Choose the creative process over the end result.

Create.

It’s worth it.

…stay tuned for upcoming posts on the rest of the Almighty songwriting process.