“ A Thousand Hallelujahs ” // Brooke Ligertwood “ Hosanna ” // Hillsong Worship “ What a Beautiful Name ” // Hillsong Worship
these people who were involved , they knew of each other from serving in different movements over the years but had never gotten to meet , let alone collaborate and actually work on creating music together . That was really rewarding , seeing all these people who knew who each other were , but had never been in the same room … get together and just bring these songs to life was really exciting .
From the Hillsong world , from my world , we had Dylan Thomas on guitars and Dan McMurray , my favorite drummer in the world . Just a beast and also a fellow Salvation Army like me , so Dan McMurray and Dylan . Then on guitars we had ... I said Dylan was on guitars . From Bethel world we had Jonathan Lee on guitars as well and David Funk who is an incredible worship leader in his own right , David Funk is . From Bethel world also we had Antonio and Allison who are kind of everywhere right now , but Antonio and Allison Marin on cello and viola who are just an incredible strings duo . The sounds that they make , that they produce , I have never ... I just don ' t even know how to describe , I ' ve never heard it .
Then on bass guitar , I was extremely excited to have Cassie Campbell who is my favorite bass player . She has her roots in IHOP actually from years ago , Kansas City . Then I actually met her when she was at Vineyard in Anaheim for a long time . I met her at Vineyard , she ' s now at a tiny little church around the Santa Barbara region , I think . But that ' s Cassie Campbell and she is just an absolute beast on the bass and extremely anointed . And so , that was the group . Then we did have a switch two days before the recording date . We were in rehearsals and unfortunately , Jonathan Lee , our second guitarist , his father passed away suddenly in
the middle of rehearsals .
That was obviously really horrific and awful , and we had a recording to do in two days . That was when E Edwards from Elevation Worship stepped in and was the armor bear for J Lee and I think got in the car at like 3:00 AM Wednesday morning , the recording was on Thursday , hopped in the car 3:00 AM Wednesday and drove all the way to Nashville and turned up at rehearsal on Wednesday . And just beautiful . What was really beautiful was just last week at Passion Conference in Atlanta , J Lee and E got to play together when we played these songs at Passion , which was really sweet . All that said , these are the people . Obviously , you could go on , and on , and on . Audio crew , production , the whole events team , everybody , amazing , amazing .
[ WM ] The exciting thing about live recordings is that they enable you to capture the kind of moments that literally come to life in a live setting . What ' s your take on the difference between a traditional studio recording and a live recording ?
[ Brooke ] It ' s funny , when the ignition turned on this project , as I talked about before , I just always assumed it was a live record , it never occurred to me that it would be a studio . I don ' t really know why that was , but definitely there was a moment a couple months before the live recording when I was like ... when someone in my team was like , " Should we just make this a studio album ?" Because it ' s complex doing a live event , especially in the current landscape . There was a lot of risk associated with doing it live . But at the same time , I don ' t know , it just never occurred to me not to .
Also , I think there was other factors like everybody involved in the project including myself have other jobs , so to speak . Everyone ' s still serving in their own churches , doing all the other stuff that they ' re doing . So , it was like this wasn ' t a hugely drawn-out process , this happened quick . It was just a small window for pre-production , and then a window for rehearsals and recording , that ' s all we had . We had to get this done , and I think with the live recording as well for me , it ' s like those , like you said , the moments that you ' re hoping to capture , but you can ' t manufacture that . I think that ' s really important .
When I listen to worship , which I do every day of my life , I do love studio projects , but I also love the sound of the church . The sound of the people I think is something that is really precious . It wasn ' t until we were editing , we started to get into editing about a month or so ago , and I heard the sound of the room for the first time . Because I always have terrible trouble with any monitors , not because of anyone else other than myself because I sing softly like a dying bird and so I get terrible bleed and all that stuff . I didn ' t have any room in my ears on the night , so I only heard the ambience mics for the first time about a month ago .
It just slayed me the sound of the people and they really , I feel like , understood the assignment . They really didn ' t come to that night for me , they really came to that night because they were expecting to meet the Lord . I think that ' s the preciousness of this project to me , is just the sound of the people is really , really , stunning , and the sound of real worship . I don ' t know , it was really important to me that everything was just ... that there was just a lot of integrity and everything , and so we didn ' t