Well, this was unexpected.
About a year ago, I got together with my good friends Jared Kliewer, David Potter, and Cody Villarreal to record some Christmas songs for our friends and family. It was very much a “just for fun” project; we tracked everything in one afternoon in the basement of a church friend’s lake house. As you can see from the photos below, there was nothing glamorous about the recording process – we just set everything up and hit record:
We put the songs on Noisetrade so we could share the music with as many people as possible. About 100 people downloaded it, and our friends and families loved it. Success. The end, right?
Not so fast. We discussed taking the music down earlier this year, but I never got around to it. There’s plenty of albums, EPs and samplers buried behind the frontpage of Noisetrade, so I left it online in case anyone ever went looking our music again. If nothing else, we had someone hosting the music for us in case we ever lost it ourselves.
Well, you can imagine our surprise when we all checked our e-mail yesterday and found this promotional message in our inboxes:
Was it random? Did someone like our music? We don’t know, but we’re thankful for the plug. Since the e-mail was sent yesterday, our EP has been downloaded more than 1,000 times!
Today is Thanksgiving, and I couldn’t be more grateful for our music to be reaching so many people. However you ended up reading this post, thank you for your support! If you found us through Noisetrade, we’d love to hear from you: we made a page on Facebook where you an connect with us. I’m especially curious as to whether any worship leaders are planning to use our arrangements during Advent.
Happy Thanksgiving, and Merry Christmas!
For those of you who are interested in knowing a little more about the Omaha Collective, here’s a quick rundown of who we are and what we do:Jared is a worship leader for Christ Community Church‘s Sarpy campus in Bellevue, NE. He played guitar and sang for our EP.
David is a worship leader, formerly of Christ Community Church, who just relocated to St. Louis to attend Covenant Theological Seminary. He recently released an album of hymns and original worship songs. Visit davidpmusic.com for more information, and grab his free download of Come Thou Long Expected Jesus on Noisetrade. He played acoustic guitar, drums, bass, and sang for our EP. He also engineered and mixed everything.
Cody is a worship leader for Journey Church in Gretna, NE. He played electric guitar, mandolin, and sang for our EP.
I, Mike, am a worship leader for Community Covenant Church in Omaha, NE. I play in a band called Flight Metaphor, and we also have free music on Noisetrade. I played acoustic and electric guitars, bass, drums, and sang for our EP.
And oh yeah…in case you haven’t yet, you can download the EP below:
