NEW ALBUM “CHILDLIKE” OUT NOW

IN COLLABORATION WITH JOHN MARK PANTANA

Check out our official Childlike merch! We have T-shirts (for a limited time) and vinyl records.

CHILDLIKE LYRICS/chords

click an image below to download lyric/chord sheet

The Story Begins on Tour.

a recap from John Mark Pantana

“This album, Childlike, started while Steven Lufkin and myself were touring in October, 2023. here we are, along with Dave Radford from the Gray Havens and Antoine Bradford. the four of us played 45+ shows in 2023 together and seriously had the times of our lives.

TOURING: it's the best of times and the strangest of times. living on a tour bus for weeks at a time has its pro's and con’s.

• you become buds. it's important you don't loathe each others existence in living quarters as small as a shoebox. luckily our crew of 9 meshed quickly and easily(95% of the time?). definitely a pro.

• sleeping (or lack there of) in a coffin-sized-bed while your suspension-less trailer-home (tour bus) drives over every pothole imaginable. (you get used to being jolted awake suspended-in-the-air). still a pro.

• playing your music every night for a live audience. big pro.

• waking up in a new city each morning to explore if you have time. wheels up at 1 AM or you get left-behind, dawg. yuge pro.

• grueling through the constant load-in and load-out every show (imagine packing and unpacking a two bedroom apartment every day). con.

• meeting all the people who love your music. proooo. running on near-empty while hundreds of people are expecting you to be ON. connnn.

• entering a complete state of total delirious-ness from the great chaos of it all. epic pro bro.

• oh, and, sometimes, in the delirium, you write songs in the greenroom. the biggest of pro's. that's where the story begins. below is a string of songwriting moments that happened on tour, which, you'll hear are typically goofy and low-stakes.

The Writing Process.

Once we started writing these fun jingles, we couldn't stop. each new greenroom of each new city instantly became our writing room. Steven is prolific on the guitar. new ideas flow through him like a language he's fluent in. he would pick up our token-$80-nylon-string-guitar (we bought it to live in the greenrooms), and within moments we were flying from one idea to the next. i've written a lot of songs but the experience of writing Childlike was completely unique. 

for one: it was entirely collaborative. there's not much alone-time on the road, and so, most waking moments Steven and I had over the legs of tour were spent creating, crafting, and having fun writing tunes (apart from the obvious playing shows, setting up merch tables, sound-checking, and a thousand other random things). We would also be amiss if we didn't mention Dave Radford as the third main writer. Dave had a knack for hearing where we were on any given song and knowing exactly what the song needed. whether it was a hook, a melody, a lyric, or just steering us in the right direction; Dave's input as a seasoned writer was pure gold. between the three of us, we wrote all the songs on this record entirely while on the Zion Caravan Tour within a span of three weeks (AKA: eighteen greenrooms across the US before each show). 

the second unique thing about writing this album: we knew we were writing a record called "childlike" very quickly. songwriting is typically puzzling enough good ones together for an entire project. for this though, within a few days of writing songs, there was a mutual consensus of "i think we are writing an album?" and that question-mark quickly became "we're writing an album called childlike". writing within the guide rails of this designated theme helped us tremendously. 

creativity can steer you down thousands of different roads, but, we had a lane to stay in and that clarity was purifying; in our songwriting, we aimed for goofy, fun, beautiful, innocent. and, i think it worked. i kept saying things like: "these are strangely good" and "these remind me of the Jesus Movement"; (in the 1960's during America's experimental drug phase, hippies who encountered Christ brought a refreshing simplicity to Christian music and in many ways de-mystified how to have a relationship with God).

lastly: we felt the help of the Holy Spirit to write the album in both the ability and desire, and, our awareness of that help became most apparent when it was over. in other words: both the ease-of-writing and propelling-desire we enjoyed the whole tour was gone after the last song was written. we were having so much fun writing the record, i didn't even stop think how much Jesus was really involved in the whole thing, but, we went from a 100mph whirlwind to a startling-stop (in the most peaceful of ways) and that surprised us and thrilled us. "dude. we finished writing an album." what a sweet, unexpected gift. we spent the last few days we had on tour recording each tune on my iPhone for a proper scratch-track. (we're giving those voice-memo's away as a reward. check it out in the reward tiers). when tour was over the biggest question mark was: "how do we record this thing?"

The Recording Process.

The dust settled from tour and all 9 of us boys (4 artists and 5 crew members) went home to our families for a much needed rest right before the Holiday season. personally, i couldn't stop thinking about the songs we wrote. i loved the joy-bombs that we created. they made me feel like a boy spending time with his Pop. 

the looming question: "how do we record this thing?"

for a moment, i debated whether or not our iPhone scratch-tracks were meant to be the record. those voice memo's are rough, ragged, and charming. that idea eventually dwindled and we, at the very least, knew we wanted to get into a studio. but, professional recording studios don't exactly scream childlikeness. sure, we could record professional versions of the songs, but, i wasn't convinced these raw-jolly-jingles would be best served in the often cold-sterile-environment of production-perfection. and so, we spent the Christmas Holiday having one too many thinking-sessions. after it was all said and done: steven and i decided to record the songs in my california-bedroom-studio on an old 8-track which was our attempt to find the chefs kiss between lo-fi / heart warming and polished / produced.

we quickly left the 8-track idea behind and started performing live-takes to a click-track. steven played guitar, (with two mics capturing it as pictured above), to accompany our one-shot vocal takes (captured by the infamous SM7B). after the first day in the studio, we decided the live approach wasn't serving the songs as well as we had hoped. i remember saying something to the effect of: "steven, you're a boss on guitar. let's start there."  and that was the approach we adopted for the whole record. we built each song around the nylon-string; i had picked up a very-vintage 1970 nylon string a few weeks prior for $120 at my local guitar shop. i knew it was a gem. steven used that old-boy (and a string of other guitars we sprawled on my bed) to build out beautiful guitar layers + that always became our launching pad for each song. i have to mention again: steven is pure magic on the guitar. recording him at the helm of this instrument was a delight.

in just 5 days (a joyful marathon of 9AM to midnight), we had finished just about everything—or so we thought; Guitars, tambourine, shaker, and vocals on the whole record. the songs turned out beautifully even with so few elements. there was a moment when we asked, "did we finish the album?" since we were both unsure with how "produced" the album should be, it was an exploratory journey. we sat on these acoustic versions of the songs for about a month + eventually decided to build the songs out more with drums + bass. 

queue the dynamic-duo-dream-team: Ryan James Carr and Kevin Dailey. these tasty boys became the peanut butter and jelly sandwich to our tall glass of milk. in other words: it was very good. ryan james is a world-class drummer (he's played with Usher) and Kev is the best musician i've ever met at basically every instrument; he played bass, keys, and vibraphone on this record. i told our mix engineer: "I love the drums and bass on this record. i want to feel those and their character throughout the album. the snare work especially is 10/10. would love for this dynamic duo to shine through." 

after these two stud-muffins added their sweet-nothings, steven flew back to california on march 5th for round-two in the bedroom-stu. we sprinted another marathon of 4 days filling in the gaps and polishing the gold: more background vocals to lift the choruses, some additional percussion elements, secondary guitar parts, etc. we also hired two incredible strings players: Kumiko Bankson and Tim Reynolds. violins added an unexpected depth and beauty to this record. showcased below is the instrumental version of track 04 on Childlike, "A Vintage Ode" featuring Kumiko Bankson on violin, J Tyler Johnson on upright bass, Amy Nichols on flute, and Kevin Dailey on flugelhorn and harp.

we wrapped production in March, and, began post-production in April. i spent hundreds of hours living in the Logic sessions toying and tinkering with everything we captured; making sense of everything, cutting parts, adding FX plugins, timing tracks, cleaning up loud tracks, and, in general, cleaning up the mess we made running an absolute marathon of 9 days in the studio. but, overall, easy to produce a record with incredible songs and musicians.

once we got the board mixes feeling pretty good.. it was time to move to the next step: mixing and mastering. we hired an amazing professional mix engineer, Chris Bethea, who did an absolutely incredible job. we started mixing June 12th and finished August 15th. Chris handed off the final mixes to our world-class mastering engineer, Adam Grover of Sterling Sound. Adam mastered the whole record on August 16th, and, with that, we are excited to say: the album is done.”