JMB Back In Action
The Josh Martin Band was back in action this past weekend - finally. For the past year, it seems like we played a gig, took three months off, played a gig and repeated the process. For the next several weeks, it’ll feel like we’re a “real” band again with several gigs coming up.
We played at Cedarmore this past weekend (our home-away-from-home) for Memorial Baptist’s men’s retreat. The weekend started for us with a rehearsal on Thursday night. Since we led worship for the retreat, we stayed away from our originals and played some new (to us) worship songs. A modern version of “Come Ye Sinners” seems to be a new favorite for the band. We also played “My Hope Is You” (Third Day), “By His Wounds” and “Days of Elijah” for the first time. It amazes me that we can spend twenty minutes learning a song and play it an hour later (in this case, “Days of Elijah”). We also broke out “Open the Eyes of My Heart” for the first time in about two years - with no rehearsal. Sometimes, we like to fly by the seat of our pants.
Josh broke out his electric guitar for the weekend. Since Bert left the band, some of our songs need a little more body to them, so Josh has decided to play his electric on a few songs. I thought it sounded great on “My Hope Is You.”
The only other real news from the weekend is that we will begin recording our next album this fall! I wasn’t expecting us to start recording so soon, but it’s coming together pretty quickly. Bert is gracious enough to let us use the facilities at Cedarmore for recording, but we have to use them before they shut them down for the winter. This means we have to get rolling, and that’s just fine by me. As of right now, this is how the album breaks down:
- Christ Is Our Life
- Clumsy Believer
- Exposed
- Good Enough
- Come Thou Fount (maybe)
- Come Ye Sinners (maybe)
We’ve worked on at least three other new songs that still need some work (and titles that I forget right now). One song in particular has come together very quickly over the last couple of weeks, and we still have more material in the works. Looks like we’ll be shooting for a release date sometime early next year!
