This is a true story.  It may sound unbelievable, but I can say with complete certainty that at this particular moment in history, a miracle occurred.  I know this to be true, because this miracle happened to me.  This is my story.

My husband, Randy, and I are musicians.  We are parents of small children (Rosie–age 5, Paloma–age 4, Kells–age 2, and Remy–7 months).  We are ordinary people who have worked lots of different jobs to make ends meet.  We are people who have lived for many years with a dream in our hearts.  And this weekend, our dream is coming true.

The two of us have been making music together since we met in the Autumn of 1999.  After three and a half years of dating and brainstorming band names, we got married in the spring of 2003.  We played lots of shows here and there, lived the stereotypical lifestyle of “starving” musicians–feeling like our music was fresh and interesting and worth sharing but never having the money to record our growing list of songs.  We started our family in 2007 with Rosie, our first child.  I filled journals with songs and ideas and prayers that God would help us record these songs.  Our family continued to grow.  It began to seem more and more impossible that we were ever going to get these songs recorded.

We had the seed of an idea for a concept album–putting together all the songs that Randy and I had written about one another over the course of our relationship.  At the time we had the idea, we had been married for seven years.  We decided we would call the cd The Seven Year Scratch (thus the title of this blog).  We really wanted to take our time and record the songs ourselves, so in 2010 we decided to start a fundraising campaign on indiegogo to try to get some equipment to record in our living room.  The response was overwhelming, and we raised enough money to buy equipment and spend a summer learning the software and beginning the album.  But recording a cd in the living room of a 2-bedroom house with teeny tiny babies is fairly challenging, and when the summer was over, we had barely made a dent in the project.  We went back to our jobby jobs, recording in then evenings, on weekends, through holidays.  We hit snag after snag–technical problems, equipment issues, unbelievably steep learning curves.  There were times it seemed we would never finish.  But Randy kept recording and learning, and we continued to move along at a slow but steady pace.

Fast-forward three years to June of this year.  We were still working on the cd.  Still burdened by how much there was to do–feeling the weight of wanting to honor all the people who had contributed to the project.  We were overwhelmed.  It felt like if we didn’t get those songs out soon, we were going to explode.

And then something amazing happened.

Someone stepped in and changed our lives.

We had met this woman several years before at a concert.  She had felt a strong connection with us and our music, and she had been very supportive all through our recording process.  She said we should set a date for the album to be finished.  I explained that there was still so much to do.  We had poured thousands of hours into this thing, but there seemed to be thousands left.  We were in between jobs and were gearing up to use most of our creative energy for brainstorming ways to make money through another summer–classes we could teach, odd jobs we could do, etc.  It was a time of real uncertainty for us.  I explained that there was no way to know, because we had so much to do and so little time to do it.

And that is when the miracle happened.

The next day, this woman called me and said that she would like to support us for 5 months while we finished the project.  She insisted upon paying for all the costs of the album and set up a cd release concert for us at an incredible local venue.  She said that getting this album out was her purpose in life for the given time.  She is not a wealthy woman.  She is a nurse who lives frugally and saves money to help others.  While this seemed like an offer that was too huge to accept, we truly saw that it was the answer to prayers that we had prayed for so many years.  Without knowing how to properly say thank you, we accepted this offer and have worked tirelessly for the last five months finishing this album.  And we are releasing it into the world this Saturday.  99.99 % of this album was created in our living room, in the midst of raising our children and making ends meet.  All of the artwork was created in our home as well, with drawings from Randy, the kids, and myself.

A year ago we settled on a band name, The Josephine Knot, and we decided to change the name of the album to Home, because it really reflects the heart of the album.  It is a collection of songs about falling in love, making a life together, raising children, living together through years of joy and sorrow.  It has almost every instrument we know how to play on it–piano, guitar, bass, upright bass, Irish whistle, accordion, percussion, drums, and more–and was created here in our living room, the heart of our home.

This is our story.  This is our miracle.  This is the only way we know how to say thank you.

Miracles still happen.  This is a picture of ours:

This cd is available for purchase on our website www.thejosephineknot.com.