Last weekend, I flew to Chicago to join Paul Sirvatka for the release of “the Christmas Album 23 Years in the RE-making,” — A Time Will Come for Singing.
[blockquote]This is Part 8 of a series on the production of A Time Will Come For Singing (Special Edition). See All Posts[/blockquote]
If you’ve been following along here on the ULS blog, you’ll know that the idea for this project — to re-release a special edition of the St. Petronille Contemporary Choir’s 1995 Christmas album — really got rolling in March of last year. It being relatively early in the year at the time, I can’t say Paul and I ever imagined we’d be releasing this album 18 months later. But such are the vagaries of holiday music projects: you have to be done in time to release it for the holiday season. If you miss your window, you might as well put the project back on the shelf and wait till the following year; the interest in hearing your project on December 26th simply isn’t there.
In any case, we were not going to miss the holiday season again this year. With mixing, mastering and artwork completed, Paul and I began talking about the possibility of hosting an “album release party” for the St. Petronille parish. I hopped on a plane last weekend and flew to Chicago. O’Hare Airport is always beautifully decorated for the holidays, and walking through the American Airlines terminal is always one of my favorite parts of visiting my hometown at this time of year.
Rather than just play the album for people to listen to, Paul and I planned what we hoped would be a very entertaining evening of stories and “behind the scenes” details about the making of this album. The parish hall at St. Pet’s has plenty of room for an event like this — approximately 150 people came out last Friday to hear us talk about the project. Of course, since the primary goal is to get people to hear and appreciate the sound of the album, we didn’t want to just use the building’s standard PA. Rather, I rented a much better quality system from Guitar Center that would do justice to the music. I brought my Sennheiser wireless mics from home as well so Paul and I would not have to share a microphone.
Before the show, time for that critical moment in anything involving audio — the sound check.
With that out of the way, we were ready for the show. Over the next 90 minutes or so, Paul and I shared the story of this project — its beginnings in the Fall of 1995, our discussions over the years about whether to re-release a single or two, the decision to re-release the entire album as a special edition, and of course some of the cool bits of audio restoration we were able to pull off thanks to the advances in audio technology in the past two decades. It was good to see many former members of the choir and old friends at St. Pet’s — I’m always glad to be home!
And now, finally — A Time Will Come For Singing (Special Edition) is now available for purchase from iTunes and Amazon, and for streaming on Spotify and Apple Music. We have a limited number of physical CDs available, too — contact us if you’re interested!
Paul and I hope you enjoy the music, and best wishes to all for a happy and blessed Christmas season!
