I released Sing for Joy (At Christmas) on Christmas Eve 2022. It was my first attempt at writing a Christmas song. I am posting it here this year for easy access, along with this year’s new song, Promise Me (You’ll Be Home For Christmas). You can find the latter here.
I started a remix of Sing for Joy this year, with some cleaned up tracks. But the results so far are “meh” — the new tracks are an upgrade, but the overall mix isn’t quite there yet. So, with the season upon us, the remix will wait for another time, perhaps as we get closer to Christmas Day. Or next year.
The song is based on a piano riff that I first came up with in 1983, during a particularly fertile period of songwriting in my life. Over the years, I tried many times to turn the idea into a song. None of them stuck. Last fall I realized that it wanted to be a Christmas song. After I accepted that basic fact, the rest of the song mostly fell together in less than an hour.
It’s an overtly Christian song — I suppose many would call it “Christian Contemporary”. Christmas is a Christian holiday, and this song celebrates the essence of that.
In some sense, recording this song put a bow on twenty-three years of serving in church praise bands. That phase of my life has ended, having gravitated back to more ancient and traditional forms of Christian worship. Age maybe? I don’t know. That aside, I always thought that part of the job of serving in music ministry was to train younger people to take up the banner and understand how to lead a service. During my gradual transition to other forms of Christian worship, it has been gratifying to see talented younger people hear the call and lead the next generation.
I do look back fondly on those years, remembering many epic, Spirit-filled moments of inspired sound. I cherish the friendships I made with fantastic singers and instrumentalists. Maybe more than anything, this song is a token of sorts to remember that eventful quarter century, as I move on to other things. But my musical focus these days is writing and recording, rather than live performance. I have been obsessed with recording since I was very young, but the busyness of mid life made it difficult to pursue, and it all but disappeared as a pastime for quite some time. So it has been nice to return to my musical roots over the past few years.
In any case, I hope you enjoy it. Either way, have a merry and blessed Christmas season. And sing for joy.
Sing For Joy (At Christmas)