the pocta demos

tonight clint and I met down at the studio to look over the pocta session demos and start thinking about the next record. we narrowed it down to about 10 songs that we think are pretty strong, and we made notes about who would be best to sing, what kind of instrumentation we want in the production, etc. we plan to begin tracking as soon as ashley has her baby and as soon as some ladies get back from recording in L.A., and as soon as benj invites us out to texas.

brian T. murphy

The Pocta Sessions (An Uncanny and Uncharted Speed In Hymn Rewriting)

A couple of weeks ago Brian and I invited our friend Benj Pocta to come visit us from his native land of Dallas, Texas. We first met Benj (that's him to your right by the way lounging in a cornfield) over a year ago through the interweb and our shared interest in Gadsby's Hymns. We figured there can't be too many nerds like us who love that hymnal so we better become friends. Well, we did. And it turns out Benj is a fantastic writer. He contributed three songs on Help My Unbelief (The Christian's Hope Can Never Fail, The Gospel Is Good News Indeed, and Draw My Soul).

So we invited him back to do some writing. By the end of the weekend we had written 15 new hymns and recorded 3 new ones written alone before the sessions. So, with a total of 18 hymns ready to be recorded, we're a little stuck on how to proceed. We just released our last record, Help My Unbelief, a few months ago.

A proposed idea for The Pocta Sessions is to record two EP's and distribute the songs exclusively as mp3's on our website. We've never really done anything like that before so it's an exciting option. Or we could just record stripped down versions of the songs and put out another record before the year is over. You see, we don't want you guys to get tired of us and hate us. But at the same time we can't quit writing these songs and, because we think they belong to the church, we are quite anxious to get them recorded and in your hands. We're open to suggestions, so throw us some feedback.

We don't update this often (hey in the time it took me to write this we could have written 37 more hymns!!) so we just wanted you all to know that we're still working and staying busy with the music. Brian and I have been recently pursuing producing other projects for people, but I think we're ready to start getting these new songs out. Thanks for reading.

Clint