Making It’s My Reward
Recording with mom in the upper room. Trilla, Illinois - 2009
Producing the It’s My Reward album was several years in the making. Something that started out as recording some tracks with mom on a whim, turned into one of the sweetest gifts to ease my grief after she passed. In 2009, I was wanting to learn more about editing audio so I asked mom if she would record some tracks with me. We spent all evening and late into the night recording. She started by playing a few of her originals and when I asked for some more upbeat songs she flipped the pages in her little songbook to Goodbye World Goodbye and really let loose on the keys. We weren’t trying to record the perfect take, we were just having fun. At this time in her life, she was still battling cancer and as it got late I could tell she was getting tired. I asked if she wanted to stop but she said she wanted to do one more. That last song was, I Won’t Have to Worry Anymore. As she sang she got tears in her eyes. As we finished up for the night, I asked her if she’d thought about writing more songs? She said she had no regrets putting that part of her life on hold while she raised us kids but she had thought she might pick it up again when she was older.
I worked on the tracks that we recorded for a few months but after she passed away it was very hard to listen to them so I put them away for a while. In the depths of my grief, I would often stay up all night singing and playing my guitar. On one of those nights, I recorded a cover song by Emmylou Harris called, Prayer in Open D and posted it to my Youtube channel in honor of mom. A few months later, songwriter Ray Miner, found that recording and reached out asking if I would perform on his Christmas album. I enthusiastically agreed as I had never recorded in a professional studio before and was honored to perform his songs. I learned so much from that experience and it was through recording that album, that I officially caught the producing and recording bug.
After three years of my tracks with mom stored away on a hard drive, I brought them to Mark Rubel who owned Pogo Studio in Champaign, Illinois. We started shaping the songs into an album. With support and funding from my family and the money I pulled together on a janitor’s salary, it took several months to prepare each song and find the right musicians to play on each track. For several of the tracks, Chrissy Rigsby taught me how to sing harmony so that we could record my voice with mom’s voice. The process took a very long time. And often making critical mixing decisions was overwhelming due to how emotional and personal the tracks were to me. After a while, I put the project on the shelf and I wasn’t sure if I would ever be able to finish it.
In 2020 when the pandemic happened and it seemed like the world stopped I started thinking about the album again. I thought about mom and her legacy. I thought about how she had plans to write more but didn’t get that chance. I thought about how her soul touched so many lives and I had to find a way to keep her work going.
However, so much time had passed and I wasn’t sure if it was possible to pick up where we had left off in the studio six years ago. I reached out to James Treichler of Wave Upon Wave Studio who still had access to our Pogo recording sessions and he set to work recovering the files. Although we were states apart (he was still in Champaign, Illinois and I was now living in Astoria, New York), we could rework each track starting the mixing from scratch.
A year later, it was finally ready to release. While I’m embarrassed it took this long to finish the album I don’t think it could have been done any other way. The decade it took to complete was necessary for me. Over that time, I continued to learn about audio production and grew more confident to make those vital creative mixing decisions. Most importantly, over this time, I continued to process my grief. While listening to these tracks still brings tears to my eyes, they comfort me in my darkest times like only a mother’s voice can. Through all of this, I’ve learned that you can’t rush grief. While the pain of losing mom will never go away, this journey allowed me to find meaning in her loss. Creating a platform to share her legacy with my family and all the other lives that she touched brings me so much joy and I hope this work blesses and inspires you.
