we just had to figure out directions of songs , recorded drones , did a live piano , upright piano thing . So , the one thing that was cool was we recorded vocals at one time . So , with everyone in our circle , we tried to capture a studio sound , but with live vocals . Because I feel that ' s one thing that I always miss when I ' m listening to a studio worship album is that playing off of each other in that community aspect . And so , we recorded them all at once . And that was one of the coolest experiences . And everyone said it wouldn ' t work . They ' re like , “ There ' s no way we can do this . It ' s all going to bleed into each other .” And we were just like , “ Let ' s just see ”.
We have all the time in the world , we ' ll see if it fails . And so , we did , we tried it and it was amazing . It really captured something very special . I feel like that was one of the better ideas that we had and that even just the vocals helped build a lot of the tracks . Doing that in the middle of the process helped a lot , because it started to take shape and we were able to see where the holes were . And I thought that in general just doing a studio recording , allowed us to really come alive creatively and play off of each other , and explore things . the liberty of whatever you can physically do . And that ' s tough for us , I think because we love being creative musically . And so , it always felt a little limiting , because you don ' t want to have tons of tracks . You want to actually let it be what ' s in the room . We couldn ' t have a live record because we were six months into a pandemic . So , there was no one to play this live record to , even in if we wanted to . We embarked on a journey to record this album ourselves . And that was not because of the pandemic . That was because we thought we could do it . And it took us two years .
[ WM ] So did you record the basic tracks with scratch vocals or you did you have charts written out for the players ? How did you do it ?
[ Mariah ] It was done in lots of different ways . We took a lot of the demo , writing demo stuff and built on it . We took some time and set the foundation of the song . We did a lot of playing live to just see how they would feel . Because I feel a lot of times songs take shape differently , when you play them live .
[ Carlos ] Live but without people . Just like a band just playing it .
[ Mariah ] We built a foundation and then
And there are a lot of different versions of each song that didn ' t make it . There ' s lots of different tangents we went on creatively . And us not having the limitation of a timeline of editing things or this or that really gave us the freedom to explore . We haven ' t had that in the past , and so I think it was exciting for us because it felt like a process that we would be able to do for a long time . Hopefully not in the same amount of time , hopefully a lot faster than two years .
[ WM ] Mariah , what inspiration , demonstration , or encouragement toward worship , did your father ( Pastor Erwin McManus ) model to you ?
[ Mariah ] I mean , my Dad is the best person on the planet and so in his life . It ' s very much generosity in the way that I think he worships . And it ' s his generosity of spirit and in time and just everything that he constantly gives . I think he used to be a worship leader . He used to