Music

My Year In Review   Year: 2002 | Run Time: 71:37

©2002 Meat Market Music and Paste Music. Produced by Joe Kirk. All songs by Bill Mallonee, published by CyBrenJoJosh Music BMI ©1995/2002.

Track List

    1. Tokyo Rose (live) [4:58]
    2. Vet (live) [4:14]
    3. Earth Has No Sorrow (live) [4:21]
    4. My Year in Review (live) [4:13]
    5. Deep End (Swamp-Stomp Version) (live) [4:53]
    6. Driving the Nails (live) [4:49]
    7. Berlin in '53 (live) [6:30]
    8. Bolt Action (Early "Bell Tower" Version) (live) [5:04]
    9. Certain Slant of Light [5:59]
    10. Postscript [3:50]
    11. Double Cure (Early Solo-Acoustic Version) [3:38]
    12. On To Bethlehem (Flagpole 1995 Version) [6:05]
    13. Sing Angel Choirs (Sister Ruby Version) [3:14]
    14. Where My Seed Might Find Purchase [6:05]
    15. All We Left Unsaid [3:44]

    Did you know?

    My Year In Review was originally a fan club release from 1995 that came out on cassette and was limited to 450 copies. This official release by Paste Music contains a number of additional live tracks and one previously unreleased song, "All We Left Unsaid."

    Credits

    Executive Producers: Nick, Josh, Will and Tim at PasteMusic. Producer: Joe Kirk. Artwork, Design/Layout: Marc Ludena with Jeffrey Kotthoff. Cover Photo: Terry Wheeler. Management and Booking: Tim White at the Wildwood Agency.

    Liner Notes

    My Year in Review... some thoughts... how we got here...

    My Year in Review was initially a fan club tape released in a single run of 500 copies to fans in 1995... it quickly sold out and never was re-released again (until now)! The Master DAT tape was lost and it was due in part to my lack of organization and all the stimuli/response dynamic of the early VOL years of constant touring and recording... although there were numerous requests to re-release it i couldn't find the master to generate copies from... and so i chalked it up as forever lost... about 4 months ago, while cleaning out some stuff, i found it... and so here it returns!

    VOL was pretty wild and crazy in those days... i was just getting into the grind and juggling act of being a touring songwriter/musician in a band that (from what i could see even) would probably never amount to more than a critic's darling band (with a loving and rabid fan base, of course!)... the multiple hats that i was learning to wear (daddy, husband, singer-guy, songwriter, guitarist, bandleader, "music biz tycoon") seemed pretty overwhelming on most days... thank God for Brenda!... a calm in the midst of the storm... then Brenda and i live in a pretty small house and what with raising two young boys at the time (praise You Lord they are grown and so beautiful, now!) i never really paid much attention to organization... my studio was a couple guitars and a Sanyo boom box recorder (which i still use a lot!)

    I wrote about 75 songs every year during those early years... and probably well near 300 cassettes now lie in everything from shoe boxes to shopping bags!... all gathering dust from the countless songs and ideas i sketched out... and then shelved away for future records... Record labels would never let us make records fast enough, so by the time it was time to make a new one, i'd written another 40 songs and it was always the newer songs out of the batch that i tended to gravitate to...

    but all those cassettes with all those "lost" songs?

    strangely, i'll probably never go back and listen to them... my life feels so short and it moves so fast... archival activity has never been my strong hand... My life is this relentless tide that carries one to the next lovely beach and for some reason i feel more compelled to write about the next new shining moment rather than dredge up older tunes i'll have to relearn... it's probably laziness on my part...

    Some folks have told me that this is a nutty way of being a songwriter and say things like: "What about all that good stuff that got lost...?"

    True... there are some beautiful things i wish i could recover... but the time it would take to do so is not what i have a lot of... and to do so seems like a study in self-centered navel gazing... it might have been different if the band had become huge and there were a "need" for that sort of thing, but perhaps not.

    But that idea that "something good has gotten lost..." What of that?

    That notion intrigues me to no end... because, as we all know, good things are being lost everyday in this broken, fragile world... and not just good songs but good deeds and good hopes... lost are acts of goodness and charity both great and small; lost is the giving of lives for another...

    What is lost in this world and how much? It can encompass everything from the innocence a child loses by being ridiculed on a playground to the last breath of a child dying from starvation in Ethiopia... and all points in between...

    When something precious is being lost, frequently the sounds and the image, if heard at all, are constantly falling on your and my deaf ears. Even among those we live and work with; even among those we cherish the most, i suspect, far too much is lost or ignored... if not outright trampled upon... (remember, we too can be the tyrants and bullies both great and small...)

    When you consider how much is "lost" and never realized in this sad old world during these "days of our pilgrimage" you may suddenly find yourself crying out to God... to God Who alone can restore all things, make them new and whole, if not now then in eternity... "where every tear will be wiped away" and where "at His right hand there are joys forevermore!"

    But here, in the present, there are opportunities enough to be about the business of recovering what is lost, diminishing some of those woes and making those oppressed voices heard... the doing of such things, whether big or small, seems to be part and parcel of what living in Jesus' Kingdom is about... If we have become deaf and blind to all that is being "lost" around us... God can open our ears and eyes if we ask Him to... He's "good like that."

    And so it is never too late and there is plenty to do... perhaps that is why it's wise for all of us to slow dow a step or two and try to be, more often, a people who pray and then get about the business of nurturing and healing, of recovering the lost, when and where we can... There are "risks" to be sure... sometimes you just take them because it's the right thing to do... a little courage (just like praising your kids!) goes a long way... My "Berlin in '53" father (who grew up poor but later loved to lead Boy Scout troops and coach baseball teams) called such risk-taking "the opportunity to put something back in."

    You'll notice the elderly sometimes watch the lips of the person speaking to them closely so they can "hear" better... i imagine the healing of our own hearing might be something like that... a simple asking God to give us the grace to make us more adept at really "hearing" one another... The elderly don't often hear every word that's spoken, but by reading between the lines and catching certain phrases, they understand better what's been said...

    Hopefully our own ability to "read between the lines" of other's deeper needs will awaken you, me, and all of us, to those "opportunities to put something back in."

    In these days, I doubt any of us will have to look very far...

    bill mallonee
    Easter 2002

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