Welcome to part 3 of the story of making Grace! If you missed any of the previous parts, here are some links so you can catch up:

Grace - An Introduction
Grace Part 1 - Mt. Vernon, WA
Grace Part 2 - Mars Hill
BONUS: The Songs that Inspired Grace
Listen to Grace
Help Make Joe's Next Album

This has been really fun. I hope you're enjoying it! Ok, back to the story...

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Recording the album

The details about the decision to make the record are hazy. Tim Smith & I were chatting about this recently and we’re pretty sure it was him. He said “I think...the songs had become so much a part of the musical life of the church” and so it made sense to make the album. It would have been somewhat unusual for Mars Hill to do a full length album for a single band. The norm was compilations like The Rain City Hymnal or live EPs, and Mars Hill Music did not exist as a label yet. But this conversation with Tim reminded both of us how crazy and chaotic things at Mars Hill had become at the time. Over the next few years, Tim’s role would change more than a few times and eventually he moved to Portland to plant Mars Hill PDX. It’s probably not unfair to say he was relieved to have some distance from the chaos of Mars Hill in Seattle. So, Tim was responsible for getting it started, then his role changed a bunch of times. Reading back through emails, it was Mike Anderson and maybe Mike Wilkerson who were tasked with managing the project to completion, but the chaos of the times meant it kind of fell through the cracks. It's a minor miracle it was released at all.

That said, Brian Eichelberger was tapped to produce the album, which was great news. He was the in-house producer at the time. Brian is one of the nicest people I’ve ever met. He’s a joy to work with, and he eventually becomes the invisible hand behind the sound of Mars Hill Music, writing and collaborating with the bands, and producing pretty much everything that comes out of Mars Hill after Grace. In 2025 he played Benayora Hall with his long time collaborator Brian Fennel (SYML), with the Seattle Symphony playing a score that he wrote. Brian Eichelberger is a remarkable human and producer of music.

We made Grace slowly, in fits and starts, over the course of two years. The first sessions were in Dan Phelps’s studio on Capitol Hill. Kind of industrial, but cozy. Dark and vibey with old couches and lamps and rugs. Racks of drums on the wall. Instruments everywhere. A great place to make music. I didn't know Dan very well at the time, just that he had recently toured with Tori Amos playing guitar. The times we had met before this had been in passing, and we never had the opportunity to connect. But, everyone was in awe of what he could do with a guitar. In time, I discovered this was for good reason. He has a particular vision and style, both wild and composed. His album Modular, is an instrumental masterpiece that puts it all on display. To this day, it remains one of my all time favorite records. Do yourself a favor and go give it a listen. The lead guitar on Benediction for the Broken on my album Halflight is Dan.

We recorded three songs at Dan's studio, and one of them became the most memorable and formative recording experience I’ve ever had in my life: What Have We Done.

We recorded it in an unusual way. Since the song is such a powerful lament, Brian thought we should lean into that vulnerability by stripping everything down to just us four people in a room playing together with none of the normal things you have like headphones (so you can clearly hear what everyone else is playing), or click tracks (which keep everyone in time). We’d have to play in a way where we could hear each other naturally, making one sound together in a room. Jackie’s piano was slightly out of tune. I strummed my parents old boxy sounding Gibson LG-0, the guitar I learned how to play on. Brian played bass, the only one of us plugged into electricity. Seth was playing a gargantuan kick drum and an even bigger ride cymbal which he had to play quiet enough so he could hear what the rest of us were playing. We were just playing our instruments into the space, feeling our way through the song in the low, vibey light. No overdubs. No punch ins. Purely in the moment. What you hear on the record is a single performance. To me this is the highest form of recording, and something I still aspire to but haven’t done since for a million reasons. It’s hard to do, but so rewarding.

During this period, Jentry & I welcomed our twin daughters Brynn & Chloe into the family. Carrying twins and birthing twins is astoundingly difficult and I have utmost respect for all the mom’s of multiples. I don’t know how Jentry survived. But we made the best of it. In the final weeks of pregnancy, Jentry was so big I started calling her JenTHREE. A few weeks later Seth & Lauren’s daughter Evie was born. A few weeks after that Audrey’s daughter Norah was born. We took a break from recording.

By the time we started again, Dan had moved out of his studio and Mars Hill was starting to build its own. The first session we did there was just me and Brian, in a vast open concrete space. It was vocals for I Look at the Cross. To be honest, I don’t remember much else about recording the actual record. That’s not to say it was not memorable, more that Jentry & I don’t remember much from the first year of parenting twins. The sleepless nights wore us thin. We were living in a fog.

I wondered if I had photos from making Grace, and I have discovered very little. To prove it, here's the best one:

I took this on my old Leica D-Lux3, a particularly hip, portable camera with the red dot Leica logo on it which meant I paid way too much for it. This was before smart phones. The only way photos happened was if someone brought their camera and actually used it. No doubt I lugged my Leica around, but clearly I didn't use it much.

The Cover Art

Jordan Butcher did the cover art for a piddly $500. He is a Grammy Nominated designer who did the cover art for Minus The Bear's OMNI, Underoath's Disambiguation and a whole bunch of other records. At the time, he was working in-house for Tooth & Nail records when Don and Ryan Clark of Invisible Creature fame were still there. The quality of work churned out of that studio in that era is astounding.

The process of deciding cover art is a thing unto itself, an artistic endeavor connected to the music, but not inherently musical. It almost unfolds like a three body problem, and if you don't know what that means, it's this: imagine there was another earth on the fringes of our Earth's gravitational pull, the moon, the Earth, and the other earth would all get tangled up in each other's orbits, like some sort of do si do dance with no actual rhythm or structure to it. There would be no more predictable seasons, tides, etc... It would be chaos. (I'm not making this up, it's a real thing, and to this day it remains a mathematical problem no astronomer has solved. Fascinating!) That's kinda what happens when you put musicians and visual artists together in an environment where the third body is a deadline.

I still have the email chain of our back and forth on iterations. It went on for 2 months and involved too many people. As someone whose day job is design, I cringed as I read the conversation unfold mainly because I wish I would have had more conviction. But I didn't. It was the classic problem of the designer (me) not knowing what he wants for his own project and hoping some other designer (Jordan), or anyone else involved would figure it out. We burned poor Jordan out. God bless him, he kept at it, iteration after iteration, balancing this side hustle with his day job, never once lost his cool. We were a tough client.

Conceptually, we covered a range of ideas. At first there was a feather. Big iconic type (or "font" for the non-designer types out there) was always something in the mix. After an initial few rounds of iteration, I relayed to Jordan how one way I had experienced God's grace was by failure and "closed doors" more than successes. He ran with the closed door idea with a couple iterations of an illustrated door on a sort of cracked mud texture. It was cool, Jordan & I both liked it, but the design by committee process killed it.

A few iterations later, he gave us the collage idea. Seth loved it instantly. I asked Jordan where the images came from. He said "I had been doing experiments for another project a year or so ago and never used these images.. They all seemed like things that either showed grace or were in need of it." Reading that back today is really amazing to me. Jordan nailed it. It had the texture, the grit, the messiness...all the stuff in the songs right there in a single image. What a fantastic job he did.

Mixing the Album in Canada

We finished recording and decided to mix it at my old friend Roy Salmond’s studio near Vancouver, BC. Roy was the first producer I had ever worked with back with my old band Static.

Seth and Brian piled all their bags into my car and we drove up together. As we neared the border, Brian mentioned that it might get complicated when we talk to the border agent. I couldn't imagine why. As I said, Brian is one of the nicest guys ever. What issue would a country known for being exceedingly polite have with one of the most polite people south of their border? He's got an American passport but is as Canadian as they come! Well, as it turns out, it was because a year or two before this, Brian's old band Barcelona tried to play a show in Canada without securing a work visa and lied about it at the border. The intrepid border agent thought a van full of hip looking 20-somethings was suspicious enough and Googled their names. He found their band website with their list of shows on it. One happened to be in Vancouver that night. Not only were they were not allowed in, they were kicked out of Canada for a year! Ha! Apparently the Canadian politeness does have limits.

We rolled up to the border and the agent asked his normal questions what brings you to Canada? and where are staying?, etc... It seemed like it was going fine until he said "Mr. Eichelberger. Have you had issues getting into Canada before?"

"Yessir," Brian replied, and then summarized the issue in a tone even overly polite for Brian.

The agent replied, "Pull over there and someone will talk to you."

We pulled over. They asked Brian to come in. They kept him in an office for over 2 hours, waiting. Seth & I could see him through the partially drawn blinds. No interrogation. No good mountie, bad mountie. Just waiting. Then after enough time passed, they handed him his passport and sent us on our way. It was so weird. And so funny. Don't mess with Canada.

We spent a week in Roy's studio mixing the record. We slept on the couches and on the floor. We re-recorded the vocals for For Your Goodness. Brian would finish mixing a song, and we'd drive around doing the car test to ensure the songs sound right in a less-than-ideal environment. Mixing typically occurs in an overly ideal environment, so the car test is essential.

One evening we paused to get dinner. Driving around looking for a place was eerie. There was a distinct lack of cars on the road and we were having a hard time finding something that we all could agree on. We finally found a chicken wing restaurant and went inside. It was packed. There was a hockey game on tv. Of course there was, we were in Canada. But this wasn’t just any hockey game, it was game seven of the Stanley Cup. Suddenly, we realized why the roads were so quiet.

The record was mixed. We crossed the border and went home. Months later, on November 9th, 2010 it was released without much of a strategy (see Mars Hill Chaos from the beginning of this email). Despite that, it charted on the iTunes Christian & Gospel charts reaching #13.

Next week, I'll share some reflections on what Grace means to me today, and a little bit more about the people who made it.

Talk soon...

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P.s. Has Grace meant something special to you?

Would you want to share that with the rest of this community? I'm considering doing an entire email devoted to your stories about Grace. If you have something you'd like to share with this community (or privately) just reply to this message.

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The Story of Grace

Grace - An Introduction
Grace Part 1 - Mt. Vernon, WA
Grace Part 2 - Mars Hill
BONUS: The Songs that Inspired Grace
Listen to Grace
Help Make Joe's Next Album