"Praise You All the Time"

As I drove to work this morning with Classical WDAV playing quietly (as is typical) on the car radio^[*], I found myself singing aloud a new melody and lyrics.  I rushed into the building, dropped my laptop bag, and pulled out the voice recorder on my phone so I could capture "the moment".

During my lunch break, that "moment" developed into this:

Praise You All the Time
by: C. Michael Pilato

You're the God of the Universe.
You're the Treasure of utmost worth.
You're the Water for all my thirst, and I will praise You.
You're the Lord of the highest mountain.
You're the Knowledge of all that's hidden.
You're the Source of eternal wisdom, and I will praise You.

I'll praise You in the morning sun,
And praise You when the day is done,
When night falls, You're on my mind.
And even as I close my eyes
And bid another day goodbye
You'll find that I'm inclined
To praise You all the time.

You're the Artist of everything.
You're the King over every king.
You're the Song all creation sings, and I will praise You.
You're the Light in the darkest places.
You're the Ruler of every nation.
You're the Author of my salvation, and I will praise You

I'll praise You in the morning sun,
And praise You when the day is done,
When night falls, You're on my mind.
And even as I close my eyes
And bid another day goodbye
You'll find that I'm inclined
To praise You all the time.

Praise to the Lord, the Almighty,
The King of creation.
O, my soul, praise Him
For He is thy health and salvation!

You're the Voice when all else goes silent.
You're the Calm when the seas get violent.

I'll praise You in the morning sun,
And praise You when the day is done,
When night falls, You're on my mind.
And even as I close my eyes
And bid another day goodbye
You'll find that I'm inclined
To praise You in the morning sun,
And praise You when the day is done,
When night falls, You're on my mind.
I'll praise You all the time.

© 2013 C. Michael Pilato. License: cc-by-3.0

Tonight, I even quickly tracked a demo recording of the song so I could return later and develop sheet music. You can listen to it here:


I got a chance to play the new song for Amy (my wife) and Barbara (our music director at church), and both gave encouraging responses.  Barbara even helped me fix a short lyrical phrase I wasn't really happy with.

What do you think?  Can a church congregation pick up on it easily enough?  Will they be exhausted by the song's pace?

---

[*]  These days, "quietly" is the only reasonable option in my 16-year-old Saturn.  Alas, three of its four speakers are torn; the fourth doesn't work at all.

"It's You"

A few years ago, a woman in our church named Lynne spoke to me about how the Lord had laid on her heart the image of manna when considering how a mutual friend endured her bout with breast cancer and the treatment thereof. If you don't know, manna is a mysterious food substance God provided to the Israelite community for nutrition as they travelled through the wilderness en route out of Egyptian captivity. You can read the narrative in Exodus 16.

The key characteristic of this experience the Israelites had, though, was the fact that—barring exceptions made for the Sabbath—manna was provided daily, and lasted for but one day. If folks tried to gather too much and keep it longer than a day, it rotted. The takeaway here is that God is willing and able to provide what His people need for each day, on each day, but that some (great) measure of trust in His provision is required to overcome our human tendency to try to solve our own problems (often with miserable results).

Anyway, with this picture of manna in her mind, Lynne approached me to consider writing a song in honor of our mutual friend with manna as the theme. Now, if you asked me to list a hundred song topics I'd like to cover, I'm sure manna as a metaphor wouldn't make an appearance on the list at all! But God's provision is a pretty key theme in the life of the Believer. So I accepted her challenge, and more quickly than I expected.

After church that day, I rapidly changed into soccer gear in the restroom and flew out the door to a match I was probably going to be a little late for. As I drove down Harris Blvd., I recalled my conversation with Lynne. Almost instantly, the first half of a chorus melody and lyrics sprung into mind. I had to whip out my phone's voice recorder feature to capture the moment. As soon as I put the phone down, the other half of the chorus spilled out, causing me to grab for the phone again. (I promise I kept my eyes mostly on the road through all of this!) Anyway, before I had really put much effort into it at all, the song's melody, chorus, bridge, and verse outline were completed. I spent a few more weeks doing piddly little tweaks to the verse lyrics and chords, etc. But in the end, I had a song.

Here it is:

It's You

It's You who set the world in motion.
It's You who governs over all.
It's You who brings the sunshine after the rain
And You who makes the rain to fall.

It's You who holds us when we're hurting.
It's You who lifts us when we're down.
It's you who offers peace when we can't understand
And you who stands beside us now.

Give us this day our daily bread
and grace to face what lies ahead;
A humble spirit so we'll give
the credit where it's due.
We're asking not to win the war
but strength to fight just one day more
So when the victory comes, it's You.
Lord, it's You.

It's You who knows our every weakness.
It's You who fashioned every one.
It's You who calls the faithful to trust You again
For You, yes You, have overcome!

Lord, You're near to us, but it's mysterious
How You nourish us with manna from above.
It's not logical; it's a miracle
Lord, You're wonderful and worthy of our love!

© 2011 C. Michael Pilato. License: cc-by-3.0

I hope someday to post sheet music for this so that others can use the song if they care to. If you follow my blog (which is statistically very unlikely, but...) you'll know to expect that this work comes with very few usage restrictions, and why. Read the content of the license linked above for full details.

I Will Sing To You (Psalm 108)

Part of my journey as a Christ-follower involves discerning how to apply the talents and spiritual gifts that God has given me (and/or allowed me to develop) toward the goal of serving Him and His people better. I love music, and enjoy making/playing/sharing it. I'm not a gifted lyricist, and over the years I've learned to understand and be (more or less) okay with that. But I've heard from a few different sources that it can be a lovely personal worship experience as well as artistic exercise to crack open the Bible and let the words therein be the lyric to whatever accompaniment springs up from within, and have enjoyed such experiences in the past.

The other night, the wife and I were having trouble falling asleep. For her, an accidentally consumed caffeinated beverage was most likely to blame. For me, it was a restless mind simply reeling with all the stuff I'd seen earlier in the day during a field trip to the Passages exhibit. So at 1:30am, I quit trying to sleep and headed over to my office/music room. I sat down with my Bible and my guitar, and then (I'm almost ashamed to admit) played a bit of "Bible Roulette" — semi-randomly choosing a chapter in the book of Psalms to read. Within a couple of minutes I was contributing to my wife's inability to sleep by playing and singing (somewhat loudly) a new melody to the slightly rearranged words found in the first part of Psalm 108:

My heart is sure, O God
I am secure, O God
With everything my soul will sing to You
I will awaken the dawn
Great are you, Lord, higher than heavens
Your faithfulness fills the skies
Be exalted, O Lord, above all the heavens
And let Your glory rise!

I will sing to You
I will sing to You
I will praise You, O God, before the world!

I first recorded the melody on my phone's voice recorder app. Then I moved to tracking a little demo on my computer. I toyed with the song all night long — adding and removing tracks, making minor adjustments to the chords for variety, fine tuning the melody, experimenting with harmonies, and really just swimming in the whole experience. Ultimately I did, in fact, "wake the dawn" with my rendition of the psalmist's words.

So... I'd made, I'd played, and now it's time to share. I'm posting sheet music of the song (which I've called I Will Sing To You (Psalm 108)) here for anyone who cares to download it. I've licensed the work under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 license. For those who are skittish about such things, let me spell out some of what this means. You don't need my permission to play this song, to share it in your own faith communities, or even to modify it to suit your own needs. And you certainly don't need to pay some CCLI royalty for performing it! Take it. Use it. May you or your family or your church or whatever celebrate by singing words that are pretty much straight from Scripture. After all, there is but one true Creator, and I suspect He loves to hear the text of His Word sung back to Him.
So, without further ado, here is I Will Sing To You (Psalm 108) in PDF and Finale formats. For those requiring an audible demonstration, you can listen to a demo recording.


Constructive criticism is welcome.

SIDEBAR: If you, unlike me, know how to properly wield Finale to lay out music according to all the conventions of the trade and would be willing to fix up that Finale file for me, I'd be happy to post the revision here and credit you. I don't know for sure that anything is wrong with the file ... maybe some ties or sequences of rests that aren't optimal ... but that not-knowing-for-sure is precisely the reason I would appreciate peer review.

UPDATE(2/23/2013): Added demo recording.

UPDATE(2/26/2013): Renamed song from just "Psalm 108".

Logos "in the wild" ... still weird to me

I still can't get used to seeing my Harrisburg Parks and Recreation soccer logos "in the wild". What began as a simple logo for my son's soccer team a few years ago grew into the opportunity to do logos for the big kids, too, and then evolved (with the assistance of at-that-time coordinator David Karpey) into the chance to design official logos for the Harrisburg Parks and Recreation sports programs.

Naturally, I started with soccer (as a fork of the adult league design I'd already done):

... then continued with baseball:

... and softball:

I never got around to finishing the flag football and basketball designs, and to be honest I haven't even noticed if the baseball and software designs ever got used. But it's kinda cool to see the two-color version of the soccer logo all over my town every Saturday of the Spring and Fall.

If anything, it's a great reminder of the many benefits of living in a smaller town, where unexceptional guys like myself can have opportunities of this sort to do something for the community simply for the love of it all: the love of a gracious God who bestows talent and desires that we serve Him and each other with it, the love of art, the love of the sport (and by "the sport" I mean, of course, soccer), and the love of the Harrisburg community.

Black Ninjas and White Tigers

This soccer season, my sons wound up on teams with opposing color schemes. My youngest son, Aidan, is a member of the White Tigers, who naturally have white jerseys with black highlights. Gavin, on the other hand, plays for the Black Ninjas and sports a black jersey with white highlights.

As in seasons past, I was interested in designing logos for the teams. And as in seasons past, I was motivated to actually do so and to get iron-on patches made up from the designs by my friend and fellow coach Wynee Bullerdick. Wynee and I have never coached together, but her son was a part of the Soccer Monsters team many seasons ago from which have launched several different coaches, teams ... and logo-lovers! So as in seasons past, Wynee offered to help fund the patch order in exchange for a share of the booty, patches she could distribute to her own similarly named teams in different age-bracketed leagues.

I did the Black Ninjas logo first. The whole black/white thing took me quickly to the Yin and Yang symbol. I wrestled a bit with using the symbol due to its connection with eastern religions, but the general concepts of balance in life and creation seemed universal enough. Besides, given that I was designing a logo for "ninja warriors", a graphic that was suitable for, say, Christian worship services was already out of reach. In the end, I offered only an incomplete yin-yang symbol.

The White Tigers design was much more difficult for me, just in terms of how tedious the work was. As I've mentioned before, I'm a total amateur at this stuff, using (or abusing?) amateur tools. No tablets with stylus input devices here. Those curves are all painfully hand-manipulated in a vector drawing application.

One thing I did this season differently than in previous ones was to avoid putting the team name in the design. I wanted to design something that was flexible enough to be reused by someone else in the future who might have a different team name altogether. This will likely be the approach I take from now on for these un-commissioned works.

If you're reading this and you have a team whose name fits, I'll be happy to sell you some of my leftover iron-on patches made from these designs! Email me at cmpilato@red-bean.com.

Phillie-area mission trip t-shirt

The ink had barely dried on my church youth group's recent lock-in t-shirts when the new Minister to Students, Trey Reid, was feeling out my interest in designing a shirt for a mission trip to the Philadelphia area. I love doing this stuff, so how could I resist?
When I think of Phillie, I think of war, revolution, liberty, freedom, etc. — you know, grade-school social studies material. From there it's but a teeny tiny cognitive step to themes revolving around the freedom that Christ offers to the believer. So that's where we went. Trey chose John 8:32 for the key verse:

Then you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free.

In terms of design constraints, Trey merely asked that the shirt be bright and absolutely not red, white, or navy blue (since it would be worn by the group as they toured Washington, DC).
As is common, I dragged my wife, Amy, into the process. We talked about various things and then independently toyed with some ideas. She was really big on the idea of using a postmark to get "Philadelphia" into the design; I was mostly thinking of ways to work a major landmark — say, the Liberty Bell — into it while incorporating the verse. When I combined our ideas, I was extremely pleased with the result:

As always, the original artwork is vector-based, infinitely scalable without quality degradation. And as always, if there happens to be someone out there who wants to recycle this design for some reason (hey, I wouldn't have believed it either were it not for prior experience), that's perfectly okay with me.
Here are some close-ups of the graphics:

My favorite subtlety is the way the postmark's curvy line calls to mind images of the U.S. flag, sitting right there behind the word "free". I wanted to ensure that "truth" and "free" were emphasized words, and took advantage of the common use of the plus sign (that is, a cross) as a conjuction. In a last-minute decision, I also inverted the Philadelphia skyline silhouette on the shirt back ("turning Phillie upside-down for Jesus!").
Feedback on the shirt has been positive, and Trey was kind enough to let Amy and I each one.  Here's a photo of the youth mission team wearing theirs:

(For those wondering, yes, I'm keenly aware of how dangerously close this shirt design comes to muddling religious and patriotic themes. In this instance, I accept that risk as a useful conversation starter.)

"Freedom"

This week is Vacation Bible School (VBS) week at my church, which means my wife and kids are gone several weeknights in a row, and I've got about three hours to run errands child-free and enjoy some much-needed Mike time. Last night, I spent that time taking care of some stuff for the church and then playing soccer with other area soccer-loving adults. Two hours of 8 v. 8 recreational fun. In the rain. It was awesome.

Tonight, after a couple of not-so-exciting errands, I took a different course. I sat down at my music computer to record a song I composed two years ago. Typically, these short little sessions are just throw-away material -- opportunities for me to learn some new recording technique or test out some half-baked song ideas. But tonight's result was something I felt was worth keeping. And not just keeping, but sharing. So, here's the fruit of this evening's labor.

Download the MP3: http://cmichaelpilato.com/pub/music/Freedom.mp3

Freedom

by: C. Michael Pilato

Father, please forgive my common heresy,
Where I picture You as merely a bigger sort of me.
But You are everything,
And in your grace I'm begging to remain.

Sometimes I'm afraid
With a fear of the unknown.
So I choose to do things my own way
And not the way You've shown.
But You are everywhere,
And when I call You promise you will come
And offer me some

Freedom from fear; freedom to love;
Freedom to search for You and all that You've spoken of;
Freedom to move slowly ever close...

Father, please forgive when
I shut my ears and eyes
To the many things You've promised
And I hear only lies.
You have always been,
And Truth is what You will forever be:
A Truth that offers me

Freedom from fear; freedom to love;
Freedom to search for You and all that You've spoken of;
Freedom to move slowly ever close,
And oh, the freedom to know You!

I obviously didn't go out of my way to doll up the recording. Very little equalization, and just some stock effects and judicious panning. But I was pretty pleased with some of the tones in the recording. My Taylor guitar really comes across well. And I had this odd idea of playing a tom drum with brushes which, I think, really paid off, offering both low- and higher-pitched attacks all in a single track. Fun stuff. I'd love to make a whole collection of stuff that feels this organic. Maybe after nine more years of VBSes, I'll have done exactly that!