Randall Goodgame’s new album, Bluebird, releases today. You can buy it at his website or on iTunes. I’ve had it on almost constant repeat for the last couple weeks, and every time I hear it, I like it more.
Reverie, the love song on the EP, reminds me of his song My Best Friend, from Arkadelphia. It has a chorus that is impossible to get out of your head, and a bridge that sums up perfectly what I think we all hope for in a lover. “When I am lost, she finds me / when I’m all tied up, she unwinds me / when I forget my name, she reminds me.”
Heaven Waits was written after Katrina. I’ve been waiting for a studio recording of this ever since he sang it at Andrew Peterson’s Christmas show at the Ryman Auditorium last year. All the Years poignantly articulates the universal longing for home, and California tells the story of a girl away from her family, in California. Bluebird can easily be summed up from the chorus, “Bluebird, bluebird / don’t you fly away / Bluebird, bluebird, don’t stay gone / Sometimes I’m up all night / Sometimes it just takes a bluebird to write a song.”
And Jubilee. What can I say about it? I couldn’t wipe the smile off my face the first time I heard it, walking around a parking lot at a hotel down in Atlanta, listening to it on my iPhone, and his performance of it at Andrew Peterson’s CD release show here in Nashville a couple weeks ago just made me like it even more. I love how it breaks into the chorus of the old gospel song Unclouded Day before the last chorus. Winn Elliott’s B3 organ parts are killer, as are the black gospel background vocals. And I love it when he lets loose and sings, “There’s ten thousand saints / from ten thousand tongues / and you know they’re marching to the rhythm of ten thousand drums.” And in the chorus, echoing the passages about Jubilee from Exodus, and the writings of C.S. Lewis in The Great Divorce, he sings, “Come Jubilee / I’m gonna want no more / Come Jubilee / I’m gonna cry tears of joy / For every hungry belly there will be a feast / For every troubled mind there will be peace.”
Randall asked me to write strings arrangements for two of the songs, California and All the Years, and I wrote a little about the behind the scenes of it of over at the Rabbit Room – here’s the post. You can download All the Years for free here, and buy the full EP, as I mentioned, at his website today.
What are you waiting for?
Hey Stephen, just listened to “All The Years” in the Rabbit Room and you did an awesome job… just like you did on the Midtown Project. especially when Randall really starts bringing it on the variation in the last chorus.
Do you use Finale or Sibelius or something else, and what program do you use to sample your strings?
Thanks, Lee. I use both Finale and Sibelius, because I have clients that need files in both formats. But Finale is my tool of choice, and has been for the last 12 years. When I’m creating simple mockups, like I did for this project or as proofs for other arrangers that I work with, I use the Garritan Personal Orchestra playing directly through Finale. When I need a more polished mockup, I use sounds from the GPO and the Garritan Jazz and Big Band, along with sounds from my Korg N1 keyboard, recording into Cubase. So nothing too fancy.
I do recommend the Garritan libraries. For their price, they can’t be beat: http://garritan.com/