We are excited to announce our NEW WEBSITE!!! Archangel Records is a new music production company which we (Garry and Victoria) have just formed. Our current project is a new Christmas CD for 2011, as well as some great concerts featuring all of the performers from the CD in December. We are very excited about the great music we can create through this venture, and we hope that you will want to be part of it. Feel free to continue to enjoy all the posts on this site, but for all the current events please visit us at Archangel Records. All of the music found on this site is available at Archangel, either to listen to individual songs, or click on the playlist at the bottom of the website to enjoy a stream of all the music. Please be sure to enter your e-mail there on the website so that we can keep you up-to-date on our new CD due out later this year, as well as the opportunity to receive free concert tickets. As always, you may comment here, but for fastest response use the contact form on Archangel Records. We hope you love the new website and visit often.
First an invitation, and then a little story. Follow the Star is a live nativity, and if you are here in the Orange County, California area the first weekend in December, it really is not to be missed. This will be the 13th year that the production will go on. I can describe Follow the Star... live animals (courtesy of some very dear friends of mine that own a nearby ranch), live actors, and very short and sweet. I didn’t attend Follow the Star for the first few years it was playing, mostly because it happens right after Sing Noel, which is a musical production I always seem to find myself playing for. The first time I went, I wasn’t sure quite what to expect. It was threatening rain that night, and as I wiped a few stray raindrops off my chair and sat down, the lights went down, and then slowly came back up... this part defies description... it was just so beautiful and full of the spirit that it seemed like it was over too quickly, and I ended up watching the next two shows as well.
Seven years ago, when my youngest son was a baby of about five months, they asked me if he could play the baby Jesus on one of the nights. I dressed him in a simple soft white outfit, and the mother who played Mary swaddled him for the show. There was another baby waiting in the wings, but because it was sprinkling outside a little bit, his mother wouldn’t let him outside. It was actually super funny, because the mother of the other baby came up to me and said, “It is raining outside. You’re not going to let him go out there, are you?” I said, “Sure, I know they will keep him safe and dry.” She kind of sniffed at me and said, “Is he your sixth child?” “Seventh, actually,” I replied. “Well, that explains it,” she said. “This is our first, and we are very careful with him.” I actually laughed a little. I wanted to say, “You’re absolutely right. We don’t even put ours in a car seat. We just strap him up on top of the car with some bungee cords.” Haha! Good times.
So Tandy turned 21 yesterday. Guess where she had her birthday party... no, never mind. You will never guess. She took a bunch of friends to a soup kitchen where they worked all day! It was pretty funny because my son Casey went, and all the people who ran the soup kitchen thought he and his friend Edo were there to get community service hours (they should both have shaved before they went!) and kept getting on their case for slacking off whenever they stopped for a minute to try to get a drink... haha! Awesome. The other thing Tandy wanted to do for her birthday was to have some friends come over to my place to record a song they sang for a young adult fireside last week.
Recording was a mixed experience. I always said that if I got the chance to record some music I would do it. Never did I realize the amount of time and commitment it would require. I wouldn’t change it though. During the process I realized that my voice is very untrained. Only after a couple of hours my throat would start to hurt and I would have to rest. Suddenly it hit me that professional vocalists spend tons of time singing to keep up that stamina. Overall, however, it was fun. It was fun to hear the end result. It was fun to hear the outtakes from all the recordings.. Victoria and I would go back and listen to the outtakes and just laugh because of our conversations. That was a blast.
Vic really is a jokester. We had so many inside jokes that they seemed to come up every single hour. From Harry Potter jokes, to jokes about missionary work, to pokes at my personality. I love that about her.
This whole experience has been very surreal for me. I am so appreciative to the McDaniel family for letting me live with them for upwards of eight months now, collectively. They are wonderful people who will do anything for anyone. Victoria doesn’t even realize fully that she fulfilled a dream for me by inviting me to record. I would never have gotten this opportunity anywhere else. My hope is that everyone who listens to the CD will enjoy the music, get into the Christmas spirit, and feel closer to the Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. I know he is the Son of God and it is truly an honor to sing about his birth and life. I love him with all my heart.
Hi, it’s me, Tandy. I am heading out the door for a program called Follow the Star, which is an amazing live nativity with animals and I get to be Mary! Not only that, but I get to sing “Mary, the Mother.” If you are going to be in the neighborhood, you should come and check it out. And yes, it is raining. But the show will go on, and I will still be singing.
Track #5- “About the Baby.”
I just want to say one more thing. We should show more gratitude to Victoria McDaniel and her musical ability. I am forever in debt for all the musical numbers she has accompanied for me. I’ll sing whatever and whenever she wants…haha! plus anything else I could do for her ;). Love you!
Okay, okay. You want some answers from the vocalists??? Here is Rachel's point of view.....
Q: Do you read her blog?
A: I have known Victoria for years and when I found out she had a blog I knew I would have to become one of her blog stalkers. Her witty humor and adventurous cooking skills are something I admire so of course I read her blog :)
Q: What was it really like for you? How do you feel about such a unique experience?
These two questions are difficult to respond to. I don’t know if I can explain the array of feelings that I felt this time around while recording.
Let me begin by saying that recording is DIFFICULT, especially when you have a deadline. There is no time for messing around. There were days when I would start singing at 8 AM and not finish until 4 PM. It sometimes felt like I was performing two concerts back to back! Singing takes a lot out of you.
Victoria wrote about an experience we had while I was in High School. I will NEVER forget that experience for as long as I live. It’s a memory that’s very private and special because only those who were there really understand the magnitude of the spirit. I can’t describe it. I wish I could have been a poet. I felt that same spirit while recording “In the Bleak Midwinter” which happens to be my favorite song on the CD. I recognize how grateful and lucky I was to be a part of Victoria’s very first Christmas CD. She could have chosen a plethora of different singer, but she chose me and that means a lot.
Q: Did she really make you cry?
A: I wish I could admit to the fact that Victoria’s the wicked witch of the west, however, she is far from that. If anything, I made her cry out of frustration because I couldn’t decide on what take I preferred more for the CD! You can thank the perfectionist part in me :)
Q: If you had the chance, would you record more of Victoria’s songs in the future?
A: I don’t think I had to even think twice about this. It’s just been something I have always done. She is a woman of many talents so why wouldn’t I accept such an amazing offer? Plus, once we’re done recording songs, I have the song as a keepsake for the future. It’s funny to listen to how my voice has changed since I was 16.
Q: Tell us something about Victoria that we don’t know!!!
I’m the last person to tell you something about her that you don’t know! This woman is an amazing chef. Amazing you say? How about this for something you don’t know….she picked me up from my house, drove to her house, did some recording, and then she says, “I’ll be right back” and in about an hour, she made me homemade whole wheat bread from scratch. Were talking, ground her own wheat into flour. What a sweetie right? All that for me, and then I even got to take a loaf home for the family to devour in a couple of hours. WHO DOES THAT? She is definitely the homemaker/cook/chef/extraordinaire I want to be like!
I hope I answered these questions to your liking! If not, visit Italiana Signorina to get a little piece of heaven from an Italiana.
AMORE
I hate to rush you, but if you still haven’t ordered CDs, or you need five or ten more for gifts, you are about to run out of time... because I am about to run out of CDs. The response to the CD has exceeded my expectations. I will order some more if I have orders for them, but if you want CDs from this initial run, you better call, e-mail, or order online NOW. Thank you to all of you who have kindly ordered, re-ordered, and then re-ordered again because you love the CD so much and want to give it to all of your friends and neighbors. I love you! xoxo
Q. How did you soundproof your “studio?”
loved Casey with her big beautiful voice and her loving, humble personality, and she passed away quite suddenly earlier this year from cancer. I can still remember her singing that song, and how many people begged for a recording of it. She was as great a performer as she was a lovely person, and we miss her. I was not at all sure I would be able to translate that amazing experience into a suitable recording.
Q. Can I have the sheet music to your songs?
A. Haha! Did it sound like me? Okay… there are no stupid questions. A lot of people have even asked me if there is any singing on the CD. The best way to know for yourself, is... listen to the CD. If you read down through the posts here, I feature all the people who performed for me. I am not sure why the confusion, but the CD is made up of thirteen tracks. Ten of the songs are original songs that I have written. One of those is just piano. The other nine are songs with vocals. I asked some of my favorite singers to sing the songs. I played all the instrumental parts, with the exception of Shelley Johnson’s lovely cello. I sang with the background singers on two of the songs, but I am quite positive you will not be able to pick out my voice. In fact, I made really really really sure of that.
A. I am glad the song sounds familiar to you, but I am afraid you must be mistaken. I did indeed write the words and the music. “Did You Know?” did not start out as a Christmas song. I wrote verses two and three for one of my boys to sing for my son Dillon’s baptism when he was eight years old. The first verse I added a couple of years later so that a children’s choir could sing the song for a Christmas concert. All of the songs on the CD, with the exception of “Silent Night,” “O Holy Night,” and “In the Bleak Midwinter” are written entirely by me. For those three traditional carols, I wrote the arrangements that you hear on the CD.
Rachel has been singing for me since she was barely sixteen years old. I think that her voice is one of the purest, most beautiful sounds I know. There is something childlike about it, even while it sounds so mature. I played one of her songs for someone in the music industry over the summer, and he remarked about how beautiful her voice was. He called it a “story-telling voice.”
The last chord faded away, and I braced for the applause… but it didn’t come. There were over 300 people in the darkened room, but all there was, was this moment of pure, awed silence. Then suddenly, the place went wild. They clapped and clapped. They gave a standing ovation. We finally left the stage, and just looked at each other in surprise. But the audience would not settle down until we both went back out on the stage. I realized something that night… that most people go through their lives without feeling that spirit that we felt there that night.
Rachel took countless hours out of a completely hectic work and nursing school schedule to help out with this CD, and I could not be more grateful. There is this line in Bleak Midwinter, where she sings, “Yet what I can, I can give him… give my heart.” And that is exactly what she does when she sings. Thanks, Rachel. Love!
I met Garry in a pretty unique way. He just showed up at my house one night, with luggage… and then stayed for six months! Garry is from Montana, and he served an LDS church mission here in Southern California from 2007 to 2009, based out of Carlsbad, California. We were hosting the missionaries in Rancho Santa Margarita, and in April of 2009 he transferred to our area, and moved into our home. We knew immediately that he was a great missionary and leader, and quickly learned that he had a love of music, and a unique and special voice that touches people when they hear it. Many evenings after family prayer we would enjoy a few minutes of men’s choir music around the piano, as my husband and boys loved to sing as much as Elder Pfile, and they sounded so awesome together.
Maybe my favorite song on the CD is the last track… Will You Hold Me on Christmas Eve? As I have explained in a previous post, Rachel had already recorded the song, and I tried three other male vocalists to sing the other half of the duet, with no good match-ups. I was fast coming to the realization that the song would have to be left off the CD. I called Garry one morning, very discouraged, and told him about my dilemma. He asked if there was a way for him to sing it. I only had about two weeks left to finish the CD, so I couldn’t really imagine a way that could happen, but I sent him the music and told him to try it, and to give me his honest opinion of whether he could pull it off. I don’t know why, but it actually made me feel better just that he wanted to try it, after the time he had in the summer. I just had such a peaceful, unworried feeling after we talked. Three days later he called and told me he knew he could rock that song. You have to understand that Garry is a music critic… especially of himself. So when he told me that he could really do it, I believed him. Then he dropped everything to come out from Montana to do the recording. It gave me the boost I needed to push through and finish the CD. And when he sang the song, he just blew me away… it completely exceeded my expectations. It took us about eight hours to record his part of that song, because he had to work one part at a time to match everything that Rachel had already recorded. I love the way the song turned out, and even more, I love that Garry went to so much trouble to do it.
Meeting Garry is proof that God works in mysterious ways. The thought that this 21-year-old guy from Montana was sent right to our house… well, certainly there are no coincidences. I don’t know how else I would ever have met him, and if I hadn’t, I’m not sure how I would have figured out I needed to make a CD this year. This music experience has been made up of a thousand different miracles, and Garry is not only one of those, but also a true friend.
If you read what I said about Tandy inside the CD cover, you might be a little puzzled about “Ninja Tag Expert.” So, just a few words about Tandy. I have known Tandy for every one of her almost 21 years. She grew up alongside my son Casey, who is about to return from his mission. He found her frequently annoying, as he thought of her as somewhat of a sister. I always thought she was cute and fun, but in her teen years when she started singing, I have to admit I did not love her voice.
Her diction was not the best… and I have never been a big fan of style over quality. But then Tandy grew up. Okay, maybe not very far. She is a little on the miniature side. But I have to say… I am a devoted fan. I love her voice. She has an amazing retro quality, and a gentleness when she sings that is almost heartbreaking. I trust her musical taste implicitly, and she came through for me on this Christmas music in a very big way. I am in awe of her talent. I knew that no one else could sing “Mary, the Mother” for me, and I am still sure that I was right.
She is completing her paperwork this week to serve an eighteen-month volunteer mission for our church. I will miss her, and I know there will be times when I will be very annoyed that she is not here to sing a song for me. But it is a wonderful, selfless thing that she wants to do, and I know that somewhere in the world, there are some people waiting to feel the spirit that she brings, and the music that surrounds her wherever she goes. Love you, Tandy!
If this was a race, then I won. I know, that sounds vain and boastful. I don’t mean it that way. But here is the thing. Today I crossed the finish line. It wasn’t a marathon, although it often felt that way. Putting together a CD in a matter of two months is not a marathon… it is a sprint. Or at the very least a highly competitive 400 meters. And today I held CDs in my hands. I spent several hours packaging them to mail to everyone who purchased one. If you have been following along and you bought a CD, it is only a matter of a very few days before you will be holding one, too.
I look back at a December 30, 2008 post from The Welcome Mat (which is my other blog… the one where I rant and rave about completely random things). I basically threw my hat into the ring and boldly said that I was going to make a Christmas CD, and that I was going to do it my own way, with my own equipment, in my own home. I was excited. Scared, but inspired. And then what did I do? I proceeded to second-guess my declaration for months on end, spend about a hundred hours trying to figure out what equipment I needed to buy from a dizzying array of possibilities and almost make decisions and purchases that would have been fatal to the project.
In the category of blessings: the equipment I felt inspired to purchase was exactly what I needed, performed beautifully and made everything sound warm and rich. My friends immediately rallied around, and vocalists made themselves available, even when I had previously subjected them to demoralizing recording sessions. They came from near and far. They practiced until they sounded amazing. They sometimes worked into the early morning hours with me, until we got what we needed. My family picked up the slack when I started to spend between 40 and 60 hours a week for that two-month period of time. I learned how to survive on about five to six hours of sleep a night (I am an eight-to-nine-hour girl). I was blessed with ideas of how to work around problems, and how to make certain sounds happen, and how to make everything about the CD sound better and better. There was certainly a shepherd, guiding me through the task. Not only that, but all kinds of people purchased the CD without even knowing what it is they would be getting. If they could take a leap of faith, then certainly I could. After the way I spent my year, I certainly did not deserve all of those blessings, so I have to figure that the CD was supposed to get done.
I also look occasionally at my Stat Counter that tells me about the visits to my blog, and I see that today I have had visits from over one hundred people, from fifteen different states and four different countries. I don’t know who you are, and I don’t know how some of you found your way here, but I am grateful, and if you listen to the music, I hope it makes you smile, and that you feel a peaceful spirit. I know it is only November 18th, but Merry Christmas, everyone. It’s all about the baby.
This is one of my favorite songs on the CD: Silent Night. It is maybe a little more upbeat than your traditional Silent Night. Shelley Johnson plays cello on two of the songs: O Holy Night, and Silent Night. I love both of those. It was interesting, though… O Holy Night took me about eight hours to put together my idea into a song. Silent Night took one take. Yes, one take. The difference is that Rachel was here for the idea phase of Silent Night. Basically, we just improvised. I played what came to me, and Rachel sang along. At one point at the end, I was coming back around for the tag at the end, and I called out, okay, last line again! She sang it, and then we looked at each other and said, “Okay, that was kind of cool… let’s hear it back!” We listened, and apart from a couple sour notes on my part, it was kind of cool, and we decided to go with it… exactly as it was. Well, minus the couple of sour notes. Then I went back and added the cello part, and Shelley made it sing. When I started playing around with O Holy Night, I had an idea what I wanted, but I knew that I wanted it to be just piano and cello, and the improvising was ever so much more difficult, since I would play what I heard, but then I had to play the cello with it, and it wouldn’t work the way I wanted, so I would have to try again… over and over and over and… you get the idea.
Anyway, you have no idea how tempted I am to put Silent Night up for you to hear. But I am resisting the urge. You have bought a CD, and you deserve some fun surprises. Which surprises, by the way, arrive on Wednesday the 18th! I can hardly believe it.
Mary, may I hold your little baby?
On the album, this song is sung by my friend Michelle Noval.
Don’t you love Joseph? He took care of Mary, he saved the day... and I like to imagine how he loved the baby Jesus. I love this Brickey painting of Joseph. It is what I think of when I read the lyric’s for “Joseph’s Song.”
My dear friend Ric Starnes, who has a father’s heart himself, came out from Utah to record this one. I’m not putting up the whole song... like I said, there have to be some surprises for the CD. But maybe later I’ll put up a little piece of it. Hmm...
Joseph’s Song
In a thousand anxious moments
I have seen this very night
I’ve imagined how I’d feel now
And I’ve wished with all my might
That I’d know you when I saw you
And I’d love you as my own
Though you’re God’s son born to save us
You’ll be mine until you’re grown.
In this city full of strangers
There is no place left to stay
But a stable meant for cattle
And a manger full of hay.
Not a place I would have chosen
For your long awaited birth,
But it’s quiet and it’s safe here
As we welcome you to earth.
Lay your soft head on my shoulder
Sleep until the night is done.
Hear my song and feel my heart beat,
You’re my little baby son.
I have seen how in an instant
Things can change like night to day.
From the moment you arrived
Life transformed for me that way.
When I held you for the first time,
Angels sang and shouted praise.
Then a new star burst from heaven
Bathing earth with silver rays.
When I gazed then at your mother
My heart swelled; tears filled my eyes
For her beauty burned like fire
As she smiled and soothed your cries.
In the glory of that evening
I fell on my knees to pray
Thanks to God for my sweet family
And this Savior come to stay.
Lay your soft head on my shoulder
Sleep until the night is done.
Hear my song and feel my heart beat,
You’re my little baby son.
Lay your soft head on my shoulder
Sleep until the night is done.
Hear my song and feel my heart beat,
You’re my little Jesus son.
Evening Lullaby
They traveled far along the dusty way
To reach Bethlehem by close of day.
Come Joseph, hasten down the winding road.
Bring your donkey with its precious load.
As they entered through the city gate
Shadows fell; the hour was growing late
Then in the purple of a falling night
Shown a brand-new star in glory bright.
Who will share a room, a loaf of bread?
Where will Mary lay her weary head?
A tiny manger in a stable bare
Will be the cradle for her baby fair.
Come, shepherds, watch and wonder at the sight.
Find the stable bathed in holy light.
Enter softly; see the babe foretold
By prophets far and near since days of old.
Baby Jesus, now it’s time to sleep.
Close your eyes; angels their watch will keep.
And when you wake the night will fade to gray
Then you will smile upon a brand-new day.
