Ten Years? (Reflections On A Decade by JJT)

Currently in the throes of releasing our Spiritual Songs by The Wayside project, I find myself often admitting that this is “our first real record in ten years.” Wow. It doesn’t seem like ten years. What happened?

First, just because we have not released a full length studio album since 2000, that does not mean we have not been active. Here’s a brief timeline…

Fall 1999, released “First Edition” of Farm [Band = JJT, Michelle, Marc Ludena, Chris Wicklas]

Fall 1999, booked enough Chicago area shows to call it our “Chicago Tour” – roughly 18 events in three months. [Added Brent King on lead guitar]

2000 – Farm released by True Tunes Records / Rhythm House. Nashville shows, more Chicago area shows. In July we played Cornerstone’s Gallery Stage for the first time (that show was released as a live album by M8 Records alongside similar CDs by Lost Dogs, The Choir, Adam Again, Mike Knott and many others.)

2001 – Played many regional shows, and got a surprise gig in Memphis at One Fest when Over The Rhine had to cancel. Our band that night was a great ambient rock group from Wisconsin called Jacobstone. We ended up doing several shows with them in Wisconsin shortly thereafter. Also in 2001 and 2002, we performed many Chicago area shows with the full band, or acoustically, and returned to showcase in Nashville.

2002 – 2003 Recorded “Given The Chance” for the benefit CD “Eyes for Kim,” with Steve Watkins at his impressive home studio. That led to recording a few more songs for what we thought at the time would be the follow-up to Farm. “Comfort of the Grave,” “Morning Will Come,” “Basically Bad,” “Find Aother Dream,” and “What You Mean To Me,” all came from those sessions. Though we liked aspects of them, it didn’t feel like an album was coming together. We gathered these new songs, added “Given The Chance,” and threw some covers we had recorded over the years to put together an interim project we called Demonstrations. We released very few copies at Cornerstone 2003 and sold out immediately. [Marc Ludena departed, and Ron Regnas joined on bass.] I did several solo acoustic / speaking tours up the East Coast, and spent much of the year in Nashville producing a children’s record with David Miner, Matt Slocum, Ken Lewis, Phil Keaggy and many others.

Also, around 2003 was the first time Michelle and I travelled to the Czech Republic to perform concerts and work with teens at an English Camp. It was an amazing experience that led to several additional trips to Prague, as well as a summer 2006 trip to Holland.

In the fall of 2003 we booked our first actual long-form tour. It was dubbed “The Wayside Presents: Songs and Stories from the Heartland.” Our kids were old enough, and home-schooled, so we loaded up the van and drove east. I’ll write about this separately, but it was quite an adventure. The punch-line; in December, in New London CT, Michelle came down with a nasty flu. Turned out, in addition to the flu, she was pregnant! Talk about a surprise. That would prove to be a major blessing, and a band set-back.

2004 – After picking up keyboardist and multi-instrumentalist Benjie Hughes we began experimenting with recording at the studio he was building. The songs “I Can’t Make You Drink,” “Wrong Turn,” and “Dance with the Devil” would come to life in this era and become concert favorites. The recordings we attempted didn’t work well, though. Other than some live bootlegs, and a demo we allowed to be included on a compilation called Returning To Lystra, these songs have still not been recorded properly or released. [Somewhere in here I also wrote and recorded the soundtrack to an original ballet called The Butterfly Princess with young Danny Galaxy helping considerably. Danny would end up playing a few shows with The Wayside shortly thereafter. Brent moved to Oklahoma.

2006 – More local shows, more Cornerstone shows, and a hat-ful of songs waiting to be released, thoughts definitely turned to recording again. In March of 2006, however, I ended up in the hospital with severe internal bleeding that nearly took my life. That’s another long story, but as it relates to this time-line it pretty well destroyed band momentum for a time. We did travel to Holland for an amazing week of music in the summer, and we regularly led worship at our home church in Aurora, IL and at Cornerstone and a few other events. It was around this time that the song “Be Born In Us Today” was written and introduced as a worship song at The Warehouse.

2007 – 2009 After years of actively avoiding moving to Nashville, Michelle and I finally admitted that we had been feeling the call for years and that we needed to do it. Though music would certainly be involved, it wasn’t our real motive to move. We had been so blessed by the community we had been plugged in to for so long, and we were so heart-sick by what seemed like a significant lack of real community for many in Nashville, we really just felt like we should move south and love people. In April EMI CMG Publishing offered me a job as Creative Director that would also allow me to maintain my company Gyroscope Arts on the side. We made the move. Talk about a disruption!

We have performed a few times here in Nashville since moving to town. A club show here, an acoustic café show there. We did monthly gigs at a church for about a year and returned to Chicago to play a couple times. But the strain of adapting to a completely new life kept us from ever really re-building The Wayside. We joined the rotation of musicians leading worship at our new church home, The Village Chapel, which has been fantastic. In 2009 we recorded a stripped-down version of “These Thousand Hills” for our buddy Pat O’Malley. Recorded by Stephen Leiweke in his studio just blocks from our home in East Nashville, the process was so fun we decided that it was finally time for us to capture the worship side of what we have been doing for twenty years. We started recording in July, 2009 and by the end of the year finally finished Spiritual Songs by The Wayside.

So, yes, this is the first finished, complete, “real,” studio album since Farm, but it’s not like we’ve just been sitting around.