SONG COMMENTARY

ABOUT THE ALBUM "CHUCK GIRARD"

This album was originally to be titled "Rock and Roll Preacher" after one of the songs. When we submitted the title to Word Records, who distributed the stuff, they told us that if the album appeared with the words "Rock and Roll" in the title, none of the book-stores would carry it, and the album would be a flop. This was 1975, and the church had not yet fully accepted that rock music could be used for God. Not my usual style, I bowed to conventional wisdom, and we let the album go out as "Chuck Girard". This was my first solo album after the group disbanded. Historically, one of the most difficult things for anyone to do is to successfully break out of a group identity and establish a viable solo identity. I was aware of this, and wanted to make an album that would ruffle as few feathers as possible. Although I had some songs that were more confrontational, I decided it was wisdom, not compromise, to select songs for this album that had positive and uplifting themes. My philosophy at the time was that I needed to earn my space, and later I could be more confrontational. This idea worked, as this album sold very well, and single-handedly established me as a solo artist, largely due to the song that was to become a minor classic, "Sometime Alleluia". I never really broadened my audience base too much over the next years because my albums never really followed formula, but I think that I offered people what they needed, not always just what they wanted.

ABOUT THE SONGS

ROCK 'N' ROLL PREACHER:

This song is very autobiographical. In my teenage years, all I ever did in my spare time was listen to music, day and night. I lived at the time in n Santa Rosa, CA, in a rural area, and after chores were done, it was music. When I started to get into playing piano, I would put on a record, and try to figure out the chords by ear. I remember learning a rather strange song for piano, a song by Chuck Berry which was an instrumental, "Blue Feeling". It had a lot of string bending and all, but somehow I made a translation to piano, without the bent notes, of course. American Bandstand was a big show at the time, and was the source of exposure for a lot of new music. I wanted to mention it in the song.
It was my simple obvious idea in this song to communicate two ideas. One, that we never know where we will end up in life for sure. I never dreamed there would ever be a time when I would be singing "Jesus Music". The other idea was to communicate the joy of discovering the real reason anyone is given a gift or talent....to serve God.

YOU ASK ME WHY:

This song was based on a variation of a Carol King riff. It speaks of the joy and optimism that can be a part of the Christian mind set if we choose it. In a world which is coming unglued at the seams, the Christian has perspective that God is in control, and no matter how bad it may seem in the natural, Jesus is Lord. I wanted to include the idea that while people are screaming for answers, the answer is right there if they are open to receive it. A production note: The "plucky" sound that appears in delay at the end of the song was achieved by putting a brick on the sustain pedal of the piano to hold it open, while strings were plucked with a guitar pick. The harmonies of the effect had to be stacked one at a time like background vocals. It took about a full studio day must to record this effect.

EVERMORE:

This was one of the 2 or 3 songs that I received in dreams. The song is completely written in the dream, and when I wake up, it lingers. If I go right to the piano, I can capture most of the basic idea. This was written when the group Love Song lived with some people from Calvary Chapel, Dean & Jean Gilbert, who donated room and board for about the first year we were Christians while we got it together. This song just speaks of the joy of salvation, the assurance that Jesus' work on the cross brings into the life of one who accepts Him.

QUIET HOUR:

This was an early attempt at a more poetic lyric. I've always been a very practical lyricist with not a lot of abstract content. This song was an attempt to break the pattern, although it is really not abstract. It's just a love song to God. Production note: The high tinkley sound throughout the song was achieved by tapping a pencil on the side of a glass ash tray that was in the studio. I was just playing with it and liked the sound, so I recorded it. In the "hoo-la-la-la-la" part, I used an actual conch shell which I purchased and actually learned to blow myself. It gave it that "Hawaii" sound.

EVERYBODY KNOWS FOR SURE:

I love this. I wrote this song while living in a tent on the north shore of Hawaii before I was a Christian. I had just learned a few chords on the guitar, and I wrote this in a whisper voice which actually kind of united with the sound of the wind outside. I was actually thinking of recording some kind of ambient sound behind it. I had in mind an air conditioner as I like the humming sound, which to me can be kind of hypnotic. I never did, for whatever reason, probably because I know that sometimes such sounds don't actually translate and just muddy up the recording. The vocal arrangement was intended to be kind of a vocal orchestra. The instrumentation is just guitar, organ and organ bass pedal with the voices being featured. The lyric is just a device to give the song a little something to say, intended to be a plaintive beckoning invitation to know God.

GALILEE:

I don't remember too much about the actual writing of this song. It's just a Bible story put to music with the usual evangelistic twist.
There was a gospel group I enjoyed even before I was a Christian. They were called the "Jubilee Four" and were on the same label I was with the Castells. I actually got them into the studio to do the background vocals. They were IN THE STUDIO, but had some kind of falling out regarding the money for the session, and actually did not sing on the record....walked right out of the studio. So we hired the women singers, who just burned up the track. Ironically, this was an all-white singing group who really did a great job.

TINAGERA:

Please, let me once and for all tell you who "Tinagera" is. In all my years, I have had more questions about this title than any other facet of my work. "Who is Tinagera?" Well, here's the answer:
When I write a song, sometimes I use what I call a "dummy line", which I use while shaping the song, and is never intended to be a part of the finished song. The most famous dummy line that I know of is "Scrambled Eggs", which was the working title of the song "Yesterday" by the Beatles. Anyhow, the opening line of this song was "She was young, she was born in the teenage era". To me, the teenage era was when I became a teenager, the 50's, when in my opinion, teenagers came into their own as a social group in a way unique in history. I believe this is true because of the ability of 20th century media to shape our perceptions of culture. Elvis and rock'n'roll provided a music that was just for teenagers, birthed out of a kind of rebellion indigenous to the teenagers of the time. Movies like "Rebel Without a Cause", "East of Eden ", and the persona in particular of James Dean epitomized the teenage image and the kind of "cool" that teenagers wanted to be like no other time in history. So this song was intended to reflect the fairly recent phenomena of teenagers who are forced confront grownup problems before they are adults, and are effectively "robbed of their youth". As I worked with the first line, which I always intended to change later, the words "teenage era" sort of slurred into "Tinagera", which sounded to me like a girl's name. I thought it would be artsy to use it as a symbolic name representing every youth who fits the description of the girl in the song. I don't know why I specifically chose a female image, perhaps it seemed more sympathetic to me. As I crossed that first bridge, I decided to also call the place she came from "Tinagera". So in effect I might have written, "She was young, she was born in Anytown, and her name was Anyone". At least that was my intent.
Musically, I wanted to use the format of a "doo-wop" song, but did not want to create a parody. I wanted to use the genre in a serious way to underscore the teenage aspect of the theme, as that was the music of my teenage years and many who would be listening to the song. I put all the '50s influences I could into the song, from the chords to the Phil Spectorish castanets at the end. The original background vocals were sung by the "Innocents", who had several hits in the '60s ("Beware" and "Gee Whiz") and who had backed Kathy Young on her #1 hit "A Thousand Stars". When we got the vocals on the song, they seemed too low and a bit dated for the track, and I blew them off, a decision I regret today. David Pack (later of Ambrosia) and I re-arranged a more contemporary but very busy background vocal arrangement which took days to record. Many of the subleties were lost in the mix, and though the vocals served the track, I really would like to have heard the Innocents vocals which would have been more fitting as I look back on it.
This song touched a chord with many people, and even today I hear testimonies of how God had used this song.

LAY YOUR BURDEN DOWN:

Special note: When I sequenced this album with the following 3 songs in succession, I caught some resistance from some record company execs that putting 3 such ballads in a row would create a "boring" segment and may hurt the sales of the album. To their credit, I was never dictated to in those days, and my decision stood, as I felt that this would not be a boring segment, but would really minister to many people. I believe my decision was the right one, as no other segment of my work has ever garnered more favorable response.
I was raised in a denominational background where I wasn't really exposed to too much spiritual or gospel music. After I got saved in 1970, I began to discover some of the great hymns and gospel songs. Somewhere along the way I heard or maybe saw a song in a songbook which contained the phrase "Lay Your Burden at the Foot of the Cross". I thought this was an idea that needed to be contemporized, and I set about to write a song that would communicate this idea to my audience. The approach to the first verse was to keep it very simple, and then come up with some kind of statement near the end. The first 2 verses are basically just a variation on each other, then the 3rd verse blossoms into the real force of the message of the song.
Production note: I n the fadeout, I was trying to get the sound of the hammer on the wood nailing the hands of Jesus to the cross. I actually brought in a railroad tie, and struck it with a hammer, putting equalization and echo on it to make it appear deeper and more ominous. Later I learned that such effects are more successfully rendered when they are exaggerations of the real sound. It may have been more effective to hit the hammer on a metal surface than the wood, or some other such approach, but I'll never know for sure.

SLOW DOWN:

The obvious inspiration for this song is the scripture : "Be still and know that I am God". Again, a simple lyric that takes no deep thought to relate to, which is often the mark of a song that can minister to many people. I'm not sure where I was when I wrote this song. Not much to say about it.
I do remember having session players work on the track, and not being able to get the mood right. Finally I enlisted the services of my sister-in-law, Gina Price, to learn the song. She is a great technician, but had never played in a studio before. I wanted to get the feel right, and she played as I sang, to no discernible tempo, just feeling our way through the song. She did a great job, and within a few takes, we got the track. I think I redid the vocal later, but actually may not have, I don't remember.
I wrote the vocal parts myself, actually notating the parts to be read by the choral group. I have only limited reading and writing ability, and it took me a long time to write out the charts on my own. I was very gratified by the depth of feeling we achieved with the vocals. In retrospect, I always felt that the song was too slow and mannered in general. It seems a bit labored and stodgy to me, but perhaps this is what adds to the effect of the lyrics. I've had many people tell me that the exaggerated hold on the word "Slow", actually ministers in a positive way to the patience of the listener, who want the note to end sooner. Go figure, it's God's business at this point., This song receives even today more mail and comment than any other song I have ever written.

SOMETIMES ALLELUIA:

My most famous song, this was my very first worship song ever. In the early days when we first started out, we didn't know how to say no. We thought if the phone rang, it was God, and sometimes played 2 or 3 times a day for weeks on end. Well, one weekend someone gave us the use of a cabin in n a So. Calif. resort area, and a bunch of us went up for a weekend of R&R. I'm not sure who all went, but it was wintertime, and we sat around the fireplace the first night to just worship. I had a guitar and I began to think about the different ways in which we express our heart to God. "Sometimes Alleluia. sometimes praise the Lord", etc., and the chorus was born. I didn't think much about it then, and basically just forgot about it. A few years later when I was preparing to record the "Chuck Girard" album, I told my wife Karen that I wanted to put o worship song on the album. She reminded me about the little chorus we sang up at the cabin. I said "Naw..that's too simple, I need a real song". Duh! At the time I didn't fully realize what a real worship song was, and wanted to write some unique kind of song about worship, I guess. Karen said, "No, I have an feeling about that song. You need to finish it". I went to the piano and the verses were written in about 20 minutes. It came out as the final piece on the "Chuck Girard" album, and in this case, the rest truly is history. Many people recorded it over the years, the most notable version being by Jimmy Swaggart. It was and still is the theme song for his TV show.
An interesting side note is that a few years later I was introduced to the sermons of Charles Spurgeon for the first time. I was reading through a sermon, and read the line "Oh let our joy be unconfined, let us sing with freedom unrestrained". This was a verbatim line that I had received from the Spirit when I wrote the verses of this song. You can imagine, it fairly blew me away.
Production note: On the studio recording of this song, which appeared on the "Chuck Girard" album we recorded the audience participation part after the fact. We took the rough mix down to a church in Long Beach, CA which had a high ceiling and good acoustics for the large vocal sound we needed. We got a congregation together specifically for the recording, ad recorded them as they actually worshipped to the song. Ironically, when we did the live version a few years later which appeared on the live Love Song album, "Feel the Love", the live audience vocals proved to be unusable due to the leakage of other instruments, etc. We had to get a group of singers together to go into the studio to re-record the audience vocals to get separation for this recording. So the studio version had live vocals, and the live version had studio vocals. Kind of interesting.