Liner notes · Just As I Am (Acoustic) (2021)

The year we could not gather.

Just As I Am (Acoustic) (2021) is our quiet record — the one we made the year we could not be in a room together. Like all eight, it was cut across a single weekend and kept to a single key; we simply could not keep to a single room. We agreed on the key over the telephone on a Friday night, and then each of us recorded our part alone, at home, and mailed it in. Pastor Connie tracked her vocals at the kitchen table, and her daughter — seven that spring — wandered in during the first take, climbed into the chair beside her, and sang the chorus back to her. We kept it. She is on every song. When people ask why the record sounds the way it does — close, plain, a little uneven — the honest answer is that it is the sound of a house you cannot leave, and the smallest voice in it deciding to sing anyway. What follows are the liner notes we would read aloud at the potluck, one track at a time, once we were finally allowed to set the chairs in a circle again.

• ✚Track 1 · "Just As I Am" — The title hymn, and an old one; we did not write it, we only came to it. To sing "just as I am" from a locked house, with no band in the room and no polish to hide behind, is to mean it for maybe the first time. We open with only Pastor Connie and the kitchen, and if you listen you can hear the refrigerator.
• ✚Track 2 · "The Second Chair" — For the chair beside Pastor Connie at the table, and the seven-year-old who climbed into it uninvited during take one. We had planned to record the song again without her. We listened back and understood that she was the take.
• ✚Track 3 · "We Agreed on the Key by Phone" — On keeping the one discipline we could keep. We could not share a room, so we shared a key — decided Friday night over the telephone, held by each of us alone in a different house. A single key is a promise you can keep from far away. This is the song about keeping it.
• ✚Track 4 · "Empty Circle" — On the chairs we did not set out that year. The circle is our whole shape, and we could not make it. So we sang toward the place the circle would go, the way you set a table for someone still out on the road.
• ✚Track 5 · "No Amplifier" — Unplugged because we had to be; there was no one to plug in for. What is left when you take the volume away turns out to be the song, and the song was always the point. We were almost grateful to find that out.
• ✚Track 6 · "Backing Vocals, Age Seven" — A whole song built around our youngest voice, a little behind the beat and entirely unafraid. She did not know she was recording. She thought she was singing with her mother, which is exactly what she was doing.
• ✚Track 7 · "Come As You Are" — The plainest doctrine of the record and the whole meaning of its title: you do not clean yourself up before you come; the coming is the cleaning. We kept the first take, because a second take would have been us trying to come as we are not.
• ✚Track 8 · "Until We Gather Again" — The closing benediction, and a promise made to an empty room that we have since kept: that we would set the chairs in a circle again, and pass the casseroles again, and stay for decaf. Until then we sang it to one another down the telephone line, each alone and none of us lonely, and called that the fellowship, because it was.

Album devotional · Just As I Am (Acoustic) (2021). Bring a folding chair, or the memory of a year without one. Recorded apart, in one key, with the smallest voice in the house on every chorus.