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DAN HASELTINE GIVES BACKGROUND FOR THE SONG, |
We actually first came in contact with a version of this song, "Jesus Blood Never Failed Me Yet," probably about eight years ago. It was originally done -- a man named Gavin Bryer, who is kind of an experimental composer (He does a lot film scoring and things like that.), was working on a project and he was out collecting sound bites and samples from different people to add to this kind of hodgepodge musical score. And he came across this homeless man that was just sitting down on the side of the road and he walked up to him with a microphone and he said, "Can you say something or sing something?" And this homeless man just started singing, "Jesus' blood never failed, Jesus' blood never failed, this one thing I know, that He loves me so."
In and of itself, that experience was probably a powerful moment. I don't even think Gavin Bryer understood how important, and what an amazing picture of God's faithfulness, and the way this man viewed the cross and who Christ was. I think that blew right over his head.
Well, anyway, Gavin Bryer gets back to the studio and they're starting to go through all the tapes and all the different samples and things that they collected over this vast amount of time, and he gets to this sample of this man singing this song and finds that he needs to just kind of work on it. So, what he does is, he creates a tape loop of the song so it will repeat over and over again and that way he can kind of work on it and, you know, make whatever changes to it he needs to, to fit it into this movie score.
Well, he decides he's going to go get lunch. He leaves the tape playing, that loop of this man's voice playing, and walks out of the room -- leaves the door open, goes down to get coffee and then he gets side tracked. When he comes back up to the studio, he looks around and he notices just a visible difference in people's character, or people's -- just their demeanor had definitely changed. And at further looking, he noticed that there were actually a few people that were weeping. And he realized what it was; is just this one man's voice, singing this over and over again -- and was just connecting with people, and just was making this very powerful movement.
So, he decided to make a whole record with that. What he did was took 72 minutes on a CD -- repeated this phrase and then built an orchestral score underneath it.
Well, we were given that CD about 9 years ago and it really became part of our experience of life. It was kind of a soundtrack a lot of us used to, when we would get done with a show in the evening, we'd get on the bus, and we'd put on some headphones and we just played that CD over and over again. It became a refuge for us and really just became a part of our spiritual growth, through a lot of that season. And we always wanted to find a way to incorporate that into our own music. And this album just seemed like the right opportunity to take that 72-minute piece of music and actually bring it back to just a 4-minute version so that we could have it. We were really excited to have it on the record. We were excited for people to hear it and we really hope that it will be something that people will connect with and it will be a refuge to sort of dissolve a lot of the noise throughout the day that people hear.