“What else do you need?” The story of Jesus Loves Me

I wrote Jesus Loves Me as an homage of sorts to several musical inspirations in my life. My dad was a big fan of the a cappella recordings of GLAD in the mid-80s, and I have memories of trying to sing along to their tight harmonies in the backseat of Dad’s Oldsmobile while The Acappella Project blared through the car’s speakers. I also fondly recall singing in a vocal jazz choir in high school and falling in love with The Real Group’s first three albums. When I heard them live at Western Michigan University in 1998, I was completely transfixed. If you had asked me in high school, I would have told you that their arrangement of Waltz for Debby was the most beautiful choral piece I’d ever heard. It might still be.

As to why I decided to record the piece myself, I suppose I was most inspired by Jacob Collier’s arrangement and recording of Harold Darke’s In the Bleak Midwinter. I’m not exploring diverse tuning systems like he is, but it certainly planted a seed in my mind. After all, I thought, how hard can it be? I had worked in a recording studio once upon a time, and I figured out how to do virtual choirs during the pandemic, and I had a computer and a better-than-decent microphone…what else do you need?

As it turns out, you also need a lot of patience. I quickly learned that I was living smack dab in the middle of he-doesn’t-know-what-he-doesn’t-know territory when it came to audio and video production. I spent way more time on YouTube teaching myself things than I ever did singing. I’ve recorded everything several times, having to do things over because of silly mistakes (or mistakes that I didn’t know how to fix), and I’ve lost count of how many takes were ruined due to click bleed or hearing my dog scratch his ear (he was laying on my feet for every take). Once, I deleted half of my project and didn’t realize it until days later. Another time, my mic quit working properly and I didn’t realize how bad the audio quality was until I had finished two hours of recording. I have so many copies of the project on my hard drive that the current version is entitled “jesuslovesme7 final draft REVISED 3.rpp.” I told Susan at least once that I was quitting the project, only to find myself slaving away on it at my next free opportunity.

Thanks John :)

But despite all those hiccups, making the Jesus Loves Me video was a lot of fun. And yes, I’ll probably try another one at some point. My respect for content creators who are pushing out quality material on YouTube every couple of days really went through the roof. Knowing how much time I put into this four-minute video helps me appreciate the hours and hours those people are pouring into their work. It was also oddly cathartic to use some of the tech knowledge that I had gained during the pandemic when we were doing virtual choirs and zoom rehearsals for a full year. Those were such surreal days; I didn’t think I’d ever want to try something like that again. However, it ended up feeling great to do a virtual choir that wasn’t enveloped in the malaise of the pandemic shutdown.

Thanks so much for your kind words about Jesus Loves Me. I am very humbled and appreciative. If we are all lucky, I’ll be able to convince Susan to do the next one :)

Dan