Well, we spent last week in the studio recording the basic tracks for an EP. It is going incredibly well. A few of the working song titles we have worked on so far… Bluebird, Heaven Waits, All The Years, California, 42 Dollars, and Reverie. I could not be more excited. I’m working with a new friend of mine - Michael Quinlan, and he’s taking me down musical roads I’ve previously never been ready to travel. And no, it’s not a hip-hop record. But it is like nothing I’ve ever done before in many ways. Many awesome ways, I think. But I guess that will be up to you all in the end. Stay tuned!

So my daughter has been clamoring for a drum set for years now. She’s doing great on the piano, and she’s got great timing, and she has just kept asking - politely even - for a chance to play drums. The thing is, drums are loud, and there’s no volume knob… or is there? Enter craigslist… I found this Yamaha drum machine a few miles away last week, and my kids have been using it every day since! You can plug in an iPod and play along to your favorite tunes, or pick from the few hundred pricelessly cheesy demo grooves that come with the unit. And if they put the headphones on, all we hear from the next room is the tap-tap-tap on the drum pads. We’ll see how the practicing goes when the novelty wears off, but I’ve got high hopes that I’ve delayed the purchase of an actual drum kit for another few years. Thank you craigslist!

Hello and welcome to the new randallgoodgame.com!

Feel free to browse around – there’s little bits to see here and more to come. For now, let me tell you about this past weekend. I took a band to play for well over 1000 soldiers in Basic Training at Ft. Jackson in Columbia South Carolina. First of all, I took a band. That’s something that I haven’t done in a while, and it was amazing. Two good friends from Caedmon’s Call came along for the ride (Andy Osenga and Garett Buell) and the indomitable Jeff Irwin brought the big brown bass, if you know what I mean… and I think you do.

Secondly, the soldiers all seemed very 17, and the M16s they were all carrying were very real. Young men and women with weapons tip down filled the gym as we scrambled to assemble the makeshift PA we dragged from Nashville. The Catholic Mass had concluded moments earlier, and we had thirty minutes to set up for the o-ten-hundred hour protestant evangelical chapel service. Why the rush? Well… since showing is usually better than telling, click here.

The first soldier to greet us on the base was Specialist Mickey, a petite woman of Asian descent with a blankly Midwestern accent. I think she was from Oklahoma. She has been on the base for one year, having enlisted days after our concert last summer. In my mind, I try to compare my last 12 months to hers. I can imagine the routine and the camaraderie she has experienced, but Mickey gave up her personal freedom and submitted herself to the authority and care of the U.S. Army. That is hard for me to imagine.

Specialist Mickey waited 6 hours for us on Saturday and we did not arrive till 7:00 Sunday morning. She didn’t seem excited about that, but she was helpful and even somewhat friendly once we got to talking. In fact, I was generally impressed with the congeniality of everyone I met on the base. It is not a light-hearted place, but the place has heart.

The actual concert was profoundly affecting – as it had been for the previous two years. It is an extremely enthusiastic crowd – and LOUD. The guys are on the right, the girls on the left, and they are so happy to have a rest from their training. Soldiers begin clapping within the first few measures of the first song. Between songs they respond with a gym-shaking “Hooah!” to most everything I say, and I mean, I could feel the hooah in my chest. Incidentally, Wikipedia describes “hooah” as “referring to or meaning anything and everything except no. I want something like that in my vocabulary at home. It seems very convenient.

Here’s the setlist from the concert…

Hands of the Potter
Share The Well
Susan Coats Pants
She’s Gone Forever
Heaven Waits
Bluebird
Reverie
Peanuts Part 1
Jubilee
Army of Angels

I’m hesitant to even write about the gratitude that seems inevitable during and after a trip like this. I have no confidence that I’ll find the right words to adequately express the range of emotions that I went through. “Good Morning Vietnam” takes over two hours, and it is brilliant – though predictably one-sided. I can say though, that being there and celebrating life and Jesus and music and the U.S.A with them made me very, very proud. Not proud to be an American exactly, just proud to be human and in the association of people who have assembled to serve something higher than themselves. Thankfully, they’ve already invited me back for next year… hooah!

My wife has been laid up for a week recovering from surgery, and her mom drove up from Ralph, Alabama to help out. Of course, “help out” pretty much meant, “do everything.”

Amy was in the bed, and I was slammed with two church services in one week on top of my typically hectic schedule when Grandmama checked in and took over like Michael Jordan. Family dirty laundry disappeared into the morning mist. The children received nourishment and attention, but not from me. “What happened to the mini-van?” Grandmama got out the shopvac and had her way till the Sienna cried mercy, and then she put it in a figure-four leg-lock. Now all the turn signals work.

On Monday, I came home from a meeting and went inside to check in. To the tune of every child’s anti-melody, I hear my son:

“You are a stooormtrooooper, but where is your maaaask? The diiiiinasaurs are coming and they are so aaaaangry.”

Then, from the window of Jonah’s room, I watched Grandmama pulling apart clumps of monkeygrass, planting each one in a row to border our front yard landscaping. This is too much. I leave Jonah to his time-defying musical and go grab my gloves.

Together, Grandmama and I raked aside the old mulch. We spread out and cut the black mesh groundcover until we reached two old thorny bushes that Amy detests. I got out my shovel.

About this time, my 5 year old boy bangs open the front screen door and carefully rushes down the porch stairs. He hollers, “Woah woah woah, dad! Wait for me!” In his raised right hand, I saw the the tiny orange shovel that came with his Home Depot tool set. Jonah, watching from his window, had seen me with my huge red shovel, and hatched a grand idea.

He tiptoed through and still trampled over the monkey grass and planted his shovel in the dirt beside the thorny shrub. “Oh, that’s great, dad!” And one tiny scoop was partially displaced. This went on for one or two minutes, and then he found the scissors and began to trim the grass in the front yard. I finished pulling out the shrubbery, Grandmama and I spread out the mulch, and we were all finished in time for dinner.

Later, this passing scene struck me as hugely significant. My son did not consider his own usefulness, rather, he was overcome with the desire to experience that moment with his dad.

As an adult interacting with other adults, this kind of behavior would be entirely inappropriate. Mature human beings do not impulsively join others in any activity without some kind of preparation or self-awareness. But as a son interacting with his father, it doesn’t get any better, especially on those rare occasions when I see past the task at hand and enjoy my son regardless of his performance.

There are people in my life who are supposed to love me no matter what. I want those people to care for me no matter how I act. If my actions need critiquing, I need to first know that I am loved. Not just nominally, but truly loved and accepted in that moment. Otherwise I am either crushed and defeated, or newly inspired to ramp up the effort to please. Both responses are evidence of a misunderstanding of the Gospel, but I reinforce that misunderstanding in my kids when I see their behavior first, and them second… which I am prone to do.

Thank God for the faith and resilience of children!

When I graduated from college, I remember my english professor Fred Ashe walking at the front of the procession carrying this huge winged sphere on a pole that looked straight out of The Jetsons. I remember thinking, “What is that?” It was a mace. Evidently, once the use of heavy armor went out of style, men came up with a ceremonial use for their proud battle club. And I’ll get back to that in a minute.

I, and many of my artist friends use the word “insecure” like an I.D. badge clipped onto our hip beatnik threads. I was having a conversation with a dear friend recently and he called himself “painfully insecure” with no hesitation whatsoever. At least he’s being honest, right?

Our culture teaches artists that our art gives us value. But even in that twisted value system, our creations are always in the past, sentencing us to a lifetime of self-doubt, and “chasing after the wind.” And man, that wind is hard to catch.

Now, as a believer of the Christian Gospel, kinship with Jesus gives me all the value I could ever need and more, but that is often hard to remember in the face of the ever-present false value system of our culture. I propose, therefore, that we pay new attention to the word, insecure. Since that’s our self-defeating word of choice, let us put it to proper use.

When the exterior doors of my house are locked, my house is relatively secure. Now, if someone really wanted to break in and screw things up, they could watch our daily habits and break in when we leave. But, I put my hope in the locks and the relative safety of the neighborhood, and drive away.

Here’s what I’m saying. As an artist and a believer in Christ, when I say “I am insecure,” I am actually saying, “I have forgotten where to put my hope.” I can not say “I am a believer” and “I am insecure” and be telling the truth about both things. I am either mistaken about my faith, or confused about the word “secure.” In Jesus, I am presently and eternally secure.

This is not mere semantics. If we agree that we can effortlessly idolize our gifts, and other peoples appreciation of them, then we can as easily encourage each other away from that tendency by calling it what it is.

“Today, I am forgetting the power of what Christ has done in me.”

“Today, I am believing a warped value system.”

“Today, I have forgotten. Will you remind me?”

That bears more hope than, “I am so insecure.” And, it is much more true.

This brings me back to the mace. What a nasty, powerful weapon. Back in the day, if you wielded a mace, you were ready to do serious harm. Today, we carry polished and decorated imitations for show. There is no danger, there is no power, and to an onlooker, the presence of a mace is just confusing.

This is what my faith is like when I claim “insecurity.” What is the point, really? This is not to say that we ought to remember Christ more. Not at all. This is just to say how much we need each other in this life of faith. For our faith to retain its age old purpose, we need to speak this language to each other as we fellowship together and perform together. As artists, we reflect the world back on itself. For us as much as anyone, it is imperative that we are not delusional. If the artist is confused about where to seek and find hope, so may become her audience.

Not therapy, but therapist…. that is, revealer of personal insights. Through the craft of songwriting, I’ve learned patience, courage, and more recently, conversation surrender.

My friend Greg Leppert came over for dinner tonight. He lives across the street and just dropped by as I was opening the can of protein Amy had left out on the counter. Black beans, Tomato Bisk, and a box of chicken flavored rice (how, exactly, do the get the chicken “flavor” in there?) was on the menu, and the kids were whining about being hungry, again. Man, it’s like every 4 or 5 hours!

So Greg walks in, and immediately the house starts to go crazy. Jonah broke his parachute man and went down in a pile of tears, Livi was crying about her non-erasing etch-a-sketch and whining something about bread and water, and so I dove into crisis mode and stuck in the Fairytopia DVD we got from Mitch Dane at our Neighborhood fellowship group last night.

Almost like magic, the kids morphed into little TV zombies, mesmerized like the bugs that cling to our screen door all evening, staring silently through the glass. Sometimes I wonder if they spend the day flying straight towards the sun.

So I’m making dinner, and Greg goes deep quick. This guy is quoting Buddha, Jesus, defining chaos theory and explaining complex social behavior through triangulation, which he also had to define for me, all in one conversation. AND he didn’t sound pompous! Dude is just being Greg.

I know it’s probably hard to imagine, but I started to lose my train of thought somewhere between wiping Jonah’s mouth (face) and the rejoicing of the salvation of Fairyland. And here’s where years of songwriting paid a modest dividend.

Over the years I have tortured countless companions as I’ve tried to recover a thought from the conversation scrap heap. “Wait, what was I saying?” or “Just a minute, I’ve almost got it.”

No, I don’t. Sweet mercy.

I’ve lost countless hours of sleep refusing to surrender to the blankness… not considering that the blankness is God’s not so subtle clue that, um… it’s time for bed.

Yes, it is. Greg was spared, I moved on, and somehow stretched a tired blog out of the whole barely significant thing. Tomorrow night I’ll write 600 words finding meaning in that extra push you have to give some car doors when they don’t close all the way the first time you shut them. Or maybe I’ll just watch the third season of Arrested Development. I really want to know if Buster gets his memory back.