YONDER BREAKS

I've been dreaming of recording a Christmas album since I was in high school, and have been slowly accumulating Christmas originals since about 2003. Fast forward to a year or two ago while I was working as an Online Worship Director for a local church during our livestream (pandemic) season. We had a big Christmas worship video shoot planned for Christmas 2020, but COVID spiked days before the shoot and so we had to cancel the whole thing. Not wanting to have a Christmas Eve livestream without any new Christmas music, I recorded a couple worship songs at home, along with some family songs as The Bickerband . I saved the Logic Pro files for those recordings, thus officially starting at least the scratch tracks to my first Christmas album. Fast forward another year-and-a-half, and my agent Kareen at The Wright Music Division of  The Jackson Agency asked for some Christmas music to pitch for those Hallmark movies we all love so much (really, I do...). So I found myself in July

I didn't grow up celebrating advent , but after moving to Los Angeles and spending time with folks from different faith traditions than my own, I've learned a lot and even picked up some traditions for our family. However, advent didn't (and still doesn't) really make a lot of sense to me. I'm all for Christmas and love to celebrate the season, but the idea of living in waiting and anticipation for a Savior that came 2,000 years ago seems a little silly. Funny enough, I helped create and curate this Advent playlist from 2020. But today I was driving and listening to K-LOVE  , which is probably the biggest Christmas radio station in the country, and they were speaking about advent and anticipation. (I feel the need to mention that I don't always love the music on K-LOVE, but they've been playing some really great Christmas stuff lately, so I've kept it on. Also, my kids love it.) I started to think about what it would be like to feel that anticipati