I’m a leap year kid.  Which means for every four birthdays that you have, I only have one birthday.  Put another way, it wasn’t until I was 4 years old that February had 29 days in it again.  The next time that happened (for me) was when I was eight years old.  Etc…  It’s just math after that.

It’s been a novelty that I’ve known my whole life.  And check this out…  We did the math once, and realized that the year that I had my eighth birthday (1996 @ 32 yrs old), our son, Michael, turned eight that year;  and four years later when I had my ninth birthday (2000 @ 36 yrs old), our middle child, Danielle, turned nine that year;  and four years later when I had my tenth birthday (2004 @ 40 yrs old), our youngest, Jennifer, turned ten.  Sorta freaky, huh…?  Maybe it’s more than just math…?

Well, the year I had my 13th birthday (2016), Danielle thought it would be fun to have a birthday party suited more for a 13-year-old boy than for a 52-year-old man.  And it was great!  Family, lots of fun kids games, hot dogs and popcorn, ice cream in little upside down baseball helmets.  Oh, and the point of all this:  My family chipped in together and bought me a Q8 video recorder, which also records sound, so that I might be able to record my songs decently.

However, I was sort of afraid of it.  I hadn’t even owned my own cellphone yet at the time!  I still don’t have Facebook or Twitter or anything like that.  My music is on CDs still (with a few cassette tapes tucked away just in case).  I am about as anti-tech as it gets.  And I just plain have a lot of trouble figuring out how things work.  “Anti-tech” and “Not very handy” describe me pretty completely.  So I thought for sure I was going to break this very nice present before I ever figured out how to use it.

Several months went by and I still hadn’t touched it.  I was torn between snubbing my family by never using it, and disappointing my family by breaking it before I actually used it.  But June rolled around and Laura and Jenni were headed out of town for an extended journey, leaving just me and Malachi (the dog) home alone.  So I thought, OK… I’ve got to give this thing a try.  Even if I do break it.

So I got out the instruction booklet again and read through the whole thing this time, and marked the pages that I thought might be the most important for me (though not completely sure what some of it meant).  Then I set up the recorder on the tripod in the living room on the first floor of our house at 1244 Teall Avenue  – right by the piano.  I got my acoustic guitar out and a number of song sheets that I had selected to try.  (And after the first weekend I remembered we had that keyboard-thing that Laura had purchased a while back (which I had never used either), so I got that out, plugged it in, and figured out how to start and stop some drum sounds for the second weekend’s songs). 

I noticed that the recorder had two live mics, so that seemed like the easiest way to get started.  But it wasn’t until after I had recorded 24 songs over the next two weekends that I realized the record levels were much too low once the songs were pulled from the recorder onto the computer’s Media Player and then burned onto a CD (so that I could finally listen to the songs properly in my car!).  Just that process of recorder-to-computer-to-CD took an enormous amount of effort/struggle, and I even managed to lose some things that had been recorded initially (still haven’t figured out where they went).

So rather than re-record all of these (much too quiet) songs, when Laura and Jenni took another extended journey a month later, I set up by the computer with a sort of “tent-like” noise-blocking “pillowy“structure around the recorder and the little tiny computer speakers and played each song back into the recorder again (from the computer Media Player) – this time with increased recording levels.  I also worked out a few “pops” and random noises by quickly decreasing the computer volume at just the right moment and then adjusting it back up very quickly.  In my world, this is “re-mixing” something.

So some of these “re-mixed” versions are what you have on this Album.

The songs were eventually re-recorded though because when my wife first heard them, she acknowledged that these were clearly the best recordings I had ever made of my songs…  But………   She asked why wouldn’t I get some nice microphones and stuff and try to make them sound REALLY good?  My answer was that I had tons of more songs to record and so my plan was to just keep moving forward until I had them all recorded.  But I did purchase a nice microphone and a stand for it with one of those pop shields, and a device to give my voice a little reverb (it’s supposed to do a lot more than that, but that’s all I can figure out!).  I also bought another guitar ( see sub-story below * ).

Twenty of the twenty-four songs from June 2016 I liked, but four just didn’t make the cut (plus all 24 totaled more than 80 minutes, so they couldn’t all fit onto one CD!).  So next I re-recorded those four castaways, plus the Isaiah 55 Suite, plus a few others the following February for what would become the first Traditional Folk Metal Album: The Earnest Expectation.  Then I decided that it really did make sense to take my wife’s advice and re-record those other twenty songs for the next two CDs: Awake and Sing, You Who Dwell in Dust (TFM #2), and …And Let the Hills Hear Your Voice (TFM #3).

So I thought I’d share these eleven older versions for this new project because, for the most part, they are the ones that evolved the most from June 2016 to when they were later re-recorded (August 2017 & February 2018).  Some of the song titles changed.  Some drum sounds were added.  Tempos, lyrics, intros, endings, chord structures were tinkered with.  Some keys and guitar tuning were adjusted, too.

The song There’s a Savior in Heaven, Son was re-recorded during the Awake and Sing… sessions, but it just didn’t seem to fit in with the other songs on that Album.  After quite of bit of deliberation I finally decided to just leave it off altogether.  But later, once I had written the Album’s Narrative (based on the final song order), I realized why that song hadn’t fit…  God’s plan – not mine.  {Update: This song was finally added back to the album … Awake & Sing, You Who Dwell in Dust in July of 2023.}

Most of these eleven tracks are fifth or sixth(-ish) takes.  The exceptions are The Man God Uses which is truly a first “one-and-only” take.  And There’s a Savior in Heaven, Son, which was approximately the 426th take…  Not kidding.  I played that song over and over and over and over again until the battery on the recorder died and my fingers were raw and aching painfully, just trying to get a version without any mistakes while sounding as close to heavy metal as I could get on my unplugged acoustic guitar!!!

Well, after reading all this (thank you!), hopefully you are already familiar with these songs from Awake & Sing, You Who Dwell in Dust and from …And Let the Hills Hear Your Voice, and therefore these older versions will be of some interest to you.

I hope and pray that these songs will touch your spirit and draw you closer to God through Jesus Christ in some way.  I truly believe that all things are possible for God, even what is impossible for us men.  May He take your life and shake it up and make it new – like He did to mine.

Blessings – and the peace of Christ be with you,

Rodger Sauer

*  (Guitar purchase sub-story):

Laura finally had me convinced that it was OK to spend some money on this pursuit of mine.  I had spent all of $300.00 on my first Alvarez acoustic guitar about ten years before.  I got it at a little guitar shop in Oneida NY.  After about 45 minutes, I was just wailing on the thing and the shop owner stepped into the room and said, “You’re not scratching that all up are you?”  To which I replied, glancing back over my shoulder, “I’m going to buy it.”  To which he replied, “OK,” and walked back out of the room.

That old Alvarez is a more heavy duty model, and I always put medium strings on it to get a bassier sound.

So I had been working a lot of overtime in 2016, and we actually had a little bit of extra money in the savings account, and I decided that I was going to go down to the local Guitar Center here in Syracuse and spend some of that extra money on a really nice Taylor or a Martin acoustic guitar.  I had always been too afraid to touch guitars in shops that had prices over $1,000.00.  But there I was – playing expensive guitar after expensive guitar.  And I just hated every single one of them!  I finally was quite frustrated, thinking what’s wrong with me?  I can’t even make an expensive guitar sound right?  Not one of them felt or sounded right at all.  (But at least I hadn’t dropped or chipped any of them.)

So I decided to take one more tour around the acoustic guitar room and that’s when I saw it….   An Alvarez acoustic guitar.  Which is really weird because you literally couldn’t find them anywhere in Syracuse (hence the trip to Oneida for the last one).  I picked it up and checked the price:  Yup…  $300.00.  It was a little lighter than the model I already had.  The neck was a little bit thinner, too.  And it sounded great!  I played it for about 15 minutes, and thought, really?  I came here to spend $1,000+ on a really nice guitar finally and I’m going to buy another Alvarez for next to nothing?

I took the guitar up to the front desk and asked the young man there if they had a carrying case for it.  He looked at the guitar rather puzzled, then looked back at me, then looked back at the guitar.  “Alvarez?  I didn’t think we carried these.”  I told him that’s what I thought too, but there it was with a $300.00 price tag on it.  And, yes, they had a case for it…  The young man strummed it a few times and said “Wow.  This is nice.”  Yup…

Glory to God!  Not only do I love the guitar, but I paid a third or more less than I had gone into that shop prepared to pay.  Praise God from Whom all blessings flow.  That’s my only explanation.  I hope you can hear the conviction in my voice when I sing those words and play the $300.00 guitar that God allowed me to have.  He can and does the impossible – “exceedingly and abundantly above all we ask or think.”  Over and over again.  In fact – He loves and offers salvation to sinners like me and like you, and He sent His only Son to die for us all;  to pay the price that we never could, if we would only trust and believe in Him with everything we have.

Then we can be with Him forever – and strum guitars and sing His praises until He calls us home and sets us free from this place.  Amen.  Amen.  Amen.