The making of Bethani's CD, 'Go Within'

BEGINNINGS

For me, Go Within is the culmination of twenty years of creative work. As music director of the Unity church, my favorite part of the service is the meditation, and I was beginning to grow tired of the ones I was singing which had been given to me by the ministers. So I started writing my own. The first one, Go Within (my personal favorite) came out of a desire to simply suggest a way for people to go to a quiet place, step by step. Darryl chose acoustic guitar for the instrumentation and he created some freeform background vocals by layering overdubs of my voice a la Joni Mitchell's early work. She's a big inspiration. He also came up with the idea of having me hum and sing open vowel sounds through much of the music. I improvised all of this on the spot, which I think gives the music additional "life". Another singer songwriter I've always admired is James Taylor, and his influences can be heard in Come in to the Quiet and Spirit Set Me Free. Rich Harney contributed his formidable writing talent to three of the cuts on the CD. Passion Prayer is vintage Rich. Lush and innocent in its yearning, he wrote it especially for me to sing on the album. Lead Me to the Light is a tune I created over the chord changes to Pachelbel's Canon in D. I've always loved the melody and thought it would be an interesting challenge to write a new one over the original progression. The bridge to It is Enough was inspired by Jackson Browne, another favorite songwriter of mine. And we recorded it with the simplest arrangement - just piano and vocal because that's what the tune is about.

I am touched and honored by the way people are responding to my music. Most frequently people simply say "Thank you." But I have heard reports of people actually experiencing physical relief while listening to the music and one woman who was losing a battle with terminal cancer told me, just before she died, that the music awakened her spirit in a way she never thought possible.

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