Purpose
The message I want to convey is this: Jesus Christ is the only Son of God, who was born of the Virgin Mary. He healed the sick and preached the gospel with his disciples. Then he was crucified, dead, and buried. On the third day, He rose from the dead, defeating sin and death once and for all time.
Every human being is, by nature, a sinner and therefore incapable of a relationship with God, and if they die in this state, they will not enter heaven. But, through Jesus, God has provided a way for us to be saved, forgiven, reconciled with him, and to have eternal life in heaven.
All we have to do is believe in Jesus and trust him to forgive our sins.
This is not something we can earn. There is no ritual or sacrament that we must receive. It is a gift we freely receive. We need only admit our sinfulness, repent of it, ask God in faith for forgiveness and eternal life, and commit to following Jesus.
If you are reading this and have not done so, then I hope these words and this music will encourage and inspire you to make that decision today.
If that can happen even once, then I will have accomplished everything I have set out to do.
History
Something I've always wanted to do, since I was a teenager back in the early 1990s when "screaming fast Internet" could be had at an hourly rate with a 14.4 kbps dial-up modem (yeah, I'm old) is to create music, Christian music specifically, that I enjoy listening to, and that hopefully my savior would enjoy as well.
To that end, in about 1993 or '94, I and a few friends formed a Christian rock garage band. We called ourselves Redeemer, and we played mostly original material.
The original Redeemer was, is, and ever shall be:
- Mark Fisher - awesome lead vocals
- Mark Rounds - face-melting lead and rhythm guitar
- Scott Mattson - absolutely amazing drums
- Dan Walter - excellent bass guitar
- Bill Crossley (me) - mediocre keyboards and sometimes backing vocals
I had to leave the band in 1995 as I was going away to college and didn't want to hold the guys back due to my inability to practice or participate much from a distance. They went on to produce a demo cassette tape, and then 2 CDs which came after a name change to Wonderboy, PhD. None of the songs from my tenure made it to any of these, but the guys were kind enough to give me a shout-out and author credit anyway.
With their permission, I have revived The Redeemer Project (because Redeemer by itself appears to be taken now) for the purpose of creating at least one full-length album, and I've even managed to recover a few of the songs from that bygone era.
Process
With all that said, we come to the second of the many things this project is: an experiment.
The music and songs are mostly generated by an AI application found at https://suno.com. Since I still possess minimal musical talent and don't even own an instrument anymore, this song-generating AI is a Godsend. My creative process is simple:
- Enter the lyrics into the AI interface. The lyrics are mostly recovered from old Redeemer songs from memory, and I have taken the liberty of re-working them in most cases, using the benefit of 30+ years of hindsight and personal growth.
- Have the AI generate the music and vocals. I repeat this process until I get a result I like and can work with. Sometimes, it comes out perfect and I don't need to change a thing, as happened with Stovokor jI'Hegh. Most of the time, a song will need a few edits and mixes before I'm completely happy with it.
- I load the file into Audacity - a great and free sound editor and production software package. I use this to add samples if needed (like the shofar in Kadosh), tidy up the endings, etc. The AI, which I like to call Mr. Microchips, is very good, but it's usually not great and ending a song.
Once the song is the way I like it, I save it onto my cloud drive and move on to the next one. That's the entire creative process for this project.
Therefore, The Redeemer Project is:
- Lyrics by the original Redeemer guys (unless otherwise indicated), with my own edits, and their blessing.
- Music and vocals by Mr. Microchips at suno.com, unless otherwise indicated, with minor edits and additions by Bill Crossley.
