Vocals, guitar, mandolin, and percussion by Dawson Vosburg. Violin by Elizabeth Knighton.
Dawson Vosburg recorded and engineered this song. It was all recorded straight into Logic Pro with an SSL 2+ Mk II interface except for the violin, which was recorded through a Behringer Wing digital console into Logic Pro.
narrative
This song was written about a decade ago. I first wrote it down in a little Moleskine notebook I was carrying around at the time and I lost it for awhile, only carrying around fragments. It’s perhaps one of the first songs I wrote that was a purposeful Christian reflection. Most of the time I was actively making music when I was younger, I resisted doing too much that was explicitly religious because I felt allergic to the culture of CCM, because I wanted to be cool, and frankly when I was young I just had a lot of intense feelings about other subjects that ended up being what I wrote songs about. I found Sufjan Stevens’ Seven Swans, The Welcome Wagon, Josh Garrels, and a few others to be interesting musicians who wrote stuff I enjoyed that included sacred lyrics, so I wanted to try my hand at writing something that was by no means a “worship song” but that was obviously about a story from the Bible and indicates that I’m a Christian.
As I’ve gotten older I’m just less self-conscious of being uncool. I think I was interested in honesty in music, but felt shy about earnestness, especially when it seemed to me like earnest sacred music couldn’t be anything but hopelessly embarrassing or didactic. But a college music education gives you such a profound sense of how excellent sacred music can be as art, even sacred music that is earnest or didactic. I’ve also come around a bit on enjoying CCM—it’s sort of the religious version of chart-topping pop music, and when it’s good, it’s perfectly fine to enjoy. I think the important problem is that it’s like chart-toppers in that it’s basically pure sugar, so you can’t make a robust diet out of it and that a lot of the people who make it are abusive or have terrible politics.
Stylistically, I’m obviously massively indebted to the indie folk of the 2000s. I grew up on The Mamas and the Papas, The Beach Boys, and The Beatles, and then got handed various songs and records from the aughts indie scene by my older brothers. Iron and Wine, especially Our Endless Numbered Days and the impossibly good B-sides record Around the Well, was the sort of mode I was writing in for this song when I composed it. Sufjan Stevens and Fleet Foxes have been my other two longstanding contemporary influences—they’ve just been so consistently good over such a long stretch of my growing up and into adulthood. My only hope is that I can be something other than a pure rehash of that stuff from a musical point of view, but I’ll let others judge that.
This thing had just incubated for so many years that I decided to just sit down and track it. I recorded everything in one day and it’s being released the same week I recorded it.
microphones
Lead vocals and harmonies were recorded with a Roswell Mini K67X, which is flavored like a Neumann U67. Vocal double was recorded with a vintage Shure Unisphere I which I got from my grandfather’s basement when he died. It sounds more or less identical to a modern SM57 to me. I had my mouth right up on the grille, a bit off axis to keep pops at bay.
Acoustic guitar was recorded with a Roswell Mini K47, a transformerless mic with a capsule in the style of a Neumann U47.
Mandolin was recorded with the Stager SR-2N, a ribbon microphone maker in Nashville.
The nutshell shaker was also recorded with the SR-2N.
The violin was recorded with both the K67X and the SR-2N blended together.
plugins
The Analog Obsession BritChannel, a channel strip inspired by the Neve 1073, is first on almost every channel.
About half the channels have a Kiive Warmy EP1A, inspired by the Pultec EQ, next in the chain.
Almost every channel hits a Universal Audio 1176 compressor plugin next in the chain.
After the 1176, the vocals run through an Analog Obsession LALA, which is inspired by the LA2A compressor.
Each instrument then runs through the ChowDSP tape emulation. This plugin has almost overwhelming control over every detail of the model.
The lead vocals finish with the JS Inflator, an open source recreation of a popular upward dymanics processor plugin that raises up quiet parts of the signal and also imparts some harmonic saturation.
There are two reverbs: one relatively small room reverb and a medium-long plate reverb. Both are open source impulse responses by Greg Hopkins loaded into Logic’s Space Designer IR reverb plugin. I also add the ChowTape plugin to the plate reverb. I send all instruments into the room reverb. The violin and vocals are sent into the plate reverb.
There is one delay, which is a Logic tape delay set to a dotted 32nd note. I also add ChowTape to the delay and send it out to the room and plate reverbs. The vocals and guitar go all get some delay.
I mixed through the MJUC Jr. compressor and the Softube tape plugin on the master bus.
LEAD VOCALS: Logic de-esser → BritChannel → Warmy EP1A → UAD 1176 → LALA → ChowTape → JS Inflator
GUITAR: Logic EQ → BritChannel → Warmy EP1A → UAD 1176 → ChowTape
MANDOLINS: BritChannel → 1176 → ChowTape
HARMONIES/DOUBLE: BritChannel → UAD 1176 → LALA → ChowTape
VIOLINS: Each channel: Logic noise gate → Logic pitch correction → BritChannel. Bus: Logic EQ → Warmy EP1A → LALA → ChowTape