The Gossman Passion, Mix Day 1

Only a few people know this, but I've been recording an album, of sorts, since last October. Today, I'm handing the tracks over to John Plymale, my favorite mixer.

The Gossman Passion is unlike any recording I've ever made. It's refreshing to say that, considering that it's my eighth album. A few years ago, some folks at the Newman Center in Chapel Hill asked me to place the Passion According to Matthew to music, just to see what I would come up with. My demo recording came out so well that the Newman Center (which, I should mention, is a church) asked that I work with its parishoners in creating a live performance of the piece. The performance ran for just one day, on Passion Sunday, and was received extremely well by the community. The extreme positive response to my work is what prompted me to make a proper recording.

What's unique about this work is that the lyrics for the entire work are directly taken from a particular translation of The Bible. Any time a charcater or group speaks in quotation marks, that prose is sung. Otherwise, there's a narrator who reads the text. What the Newman Center asked me to do was to pretend that I was giving a concert. But, instead of performing my music, I was to perform this passage of the Gospel. In that way, it's not exactly a Mike Garrigan album. I'd say that it's more like a musical, but then, there's really no movement about a stage either. It's musical/narrative hybrid of a cherished and tragic tale.

In the first performance of this piece, which I like to call "the workshop," I performed the part of Jesus and played the acoustic guitar. That seemed to make sense. All of the other parts were handed over to a cast of performers who sang and performed the music, as we would if we were doing a real show.

For this recording, I wanted to be true to the original vision of what I was asked to do. When considering the basic casting of the piece, I kept one central question in the front of my mind: If I were going to walk into a club and perform this, who would be with me? For starters, I'd ask my band. Then, I'd get the four or five singers that I personally know who could pull this off with me. It only made since that the band would be Jeremy Cannon on drums, Alex McKinney on bass, and me on guitar.

Since the electric guitar is almost secondary to this work, I didn't ask Mark Kano to perform any guitar work on the piece. However, Mark was the obvious choice for the role of Judas and Pilate, two vocally demanding roles. I also needed a good tenor with a rasp for a few of the songs. Chris Spruill, formerly of The Clear and Far Too Jones, was a great choice for the role of Peter and a few "other voices" roles. My brother Jay, who is much more over the top than I am, was perfect for Caiaphas, the high priest.

Although women have very few speaking roles in Matthew, I wrote some of the lines of the diciples for a woman to perform. I had the privelege of writing a song with Kyler England, who resides in Los Angeles and occasionally tours the East Coast, last October. I saw that she was passing by my way last December and she was able to sing the female alto parts. Also, Kate Gallagher, the narrator from "the workshop," did such a good job during the first performance that I couldn't imagine recording this piece without her voice. And, my wife, Holly, makes a brief appearance as Pilate's wife.

One of the more exciting aspects of this project, at least for me, is that it is my first use of a choir in a studio setting. My original demo sounded more like a Queen record at times. What that told me was that I needed to get a real choir involved in this project. In "the workshop" we had plenty of choral singers to really round out the big moments of the piece. For this studio recording, I contacted Mike Meyer, who leads the Durham Choral Society, for his best singers. Last December, the week before Christmas, we went to Overdub Lane to track the choral parts. Using part talent, part studio trickery, we made four singers sound like many.

It has been an exhausting four months. If you've wondered why I haven't been out playing shows lately, it's because I was either running, working on this, or trying to get my end of the DVD bargain filled. I'm sitting in an off room right now at Overdub Lane. I'm hearing John put "Caiaphas" together as I write this. Man, he's making it sound great.

"Caiaphas" is the third song of six in this project. It's what I like to call a narrative piece in that it tells a bulk of the Passion story, getting us from Jesus' arrest near Gethsemane to his trial before the people. It basically has an A-B-A-B-A-B format. What that means is there's an A melody with a certain set of chords and then a B melody with a different set of chords. In "the workshop" this was the most difficult of the six pieces to perform. The A is very free flowing and the B is tense. I use maj7 and b13 chords on the B section to make it sound impactful.

The reason we're mixing "Caiaphas" first is because it's the only song that contains every performer. In that way, we'll be able to make notes of how to treat everything. The first day always takes the longest for that reason.

Well, so far so good.