Laying down vocal tracks at the studio.
Every couple of days for the next 2 weeks or so, I’m going to write a post about one of the songs from the CD that we’ll be releasing soon. I wrote all but one of the songs on the record, and I really hope you’ll be moved by them as much as I enjoyed writing them.
CONSUME ME
Usually when I write a song, it happens pretty quickly for the most part. One or two of the songs on this record were written basically top-to-bottom in under half an hour. “Consume Me” is a different story.
I wrote this song over a period of two years, from 2005-07. I was working as a waiter in 2005, and I got home from working a double one night and as my head hit my pillow to finally crash, I realized that I had fallen into this routine of every day doing the same things, seeing the same people, going to the same places. And as if He said it to my face, I could almost hear the voice of God prodding me that I hadn’t even considered including Him in my routine.
I went to church. At the time that seemed like enough. But for some reason, and for the first time in quite a while, I had this feeling somewhere deep inside to renew a passion that I had turned away from a long time before. Not just to know about Jesus, but to “do life” with Him.
I committed myself right at that moment to change my routine. Instead of waking up and spending the first half hour of my day hitting the snooze button, I would spend the first few minutes of my day for the next week reading my Bible. I figured that would give me enough of a chance to know if this was really God talking, or if I was just tired from a long day and cranky customers. That’s when this line came into my head:
“I wake up and my feet hit the floor, every day it’s all the same to me
But today I want to know You more so I’m asking you for just one thing”
I also wrote a b-section that night that I scrapped pretty soon after, and the chords changed seven or eight times before I finally settled on something similar to what’s been recorded for this album.
Five years later, and we have this tune that isn’t really lyrically complicated and doesn’t strike you as being full of some intensely profound pearls of wisdom or anything. It’s just a simple confession of a desire to know God more.
Here’s an audio clip of the song (if the clip doesn’t load below, you can download the clip by right-click (PC) or CTRL-click (MAC) and select “Save target as” or “Download linked file as”):
