Hi all, here we are with Week 47! Andrew has written a song and has kindly agreed to share it with Hope Hour. You can listen to the song here.
The variety and creativity of the stories shared through Hope Hour continues to be amazing to me and I love that this week I get to share a song!
Below, Andrew responds to my question "Where did the inspiration for this particular song come from?". He shares the story behind the song and about how it comes to a focal point...
In Andrew's words...
I don't know if you could say I was "inspired" to write this song. I set out quite early one morning at the very end of October with Stanley, our lurcher, and found myself in a literal fog. The kind you get at this time of the year which just shuts off the rest of the world. We could hear various other dogs barking to each other - probably just to say "I'm out here. over the railway line!" - but couldn't see a thing. The phrase "waiting for the fog to lift", complete with its tune, just sort of dropped into my head and I worked back from there, not knowing that it would turn out to be the punchline. And I knew that it had symbolic meaning as well as literal. Actually, we were fog-bound until I got back home an hour or two later, and then typically it cleared away and we had a lovely sunny day.
As far as the song was concerned it was probably about half-written by then. I've just checked on my iPhone and see that I had recorded the first two lines out in the open sometime on 31 October. That's something I often do, because otherwise trying to recover the melody can be a longwinded process. You tend to think it will come straight back to you, but it doesn't. I'm quite surprised to find that it's exactly as the finished version. Â
Then there's the whole process of shaping and refining: chucking out the forced rhymes and dead-end verses and deciding what I really want to say. In this case, I always knew that I wanted to make Christmas the end-point with some sort of hopeful resolution. I'm very pleased with the lines:Â
"a new-born baby turned out to be
the perfect gift"
There's no doubt in my mind that they're the most important lines in the song and I hope everyone can hear that. My son Ashley helped with the recording and he seemed to agree. (I say "helped" but he actually did all the hard work!)
I don't like to be someone who is always moaning about the commercialisation and cost of Christmas. In fact I quite like the American expression The Holidays: something to be shared with everyone, a gift to the world.
Thank you all so much for reading this story about God connecting with his people. Let us know your thoughts in the comments.
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Until next time,
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