Apparently, many of Martin Smith's transatlantic phone calls come with a built-in feeling-out period.
"Aren't you supposed to ask my favorite color?" laughs the front man and songwriter for Delirious?, the British outfit long at the forefront of modern worship music's explosion over the past decade. "What about my cat's name?"
But small talk is more than a little counterintuitive when considering the scope of the endeavor Smith's had his hands in for the past two-plus years: the multiwriter, multiartist, multigenre charity project CompassionArt.
Christian music fans started hearing rumblings about the idea this time last year. A dozen big-name songwriters from across the globe were getting together to craft songs for charity. The first publicly available fruit appeared at last year's Dove Awards as the song "So Great" was debuted on the broadcast. The 15-song album and accompanying book were released in November in the United Kingdom and make their way onto stateside store shelves on Tuesday.
But the idea started percolating in Smith's psyche long before that, as he traveled around the world with his band, witnessing crushing poverty up close while constantly wondering what he could do to help alleviate it.
As detailed in the diary-drawn chapter written by Smith and wife Anna in the book The Art of Compassion, Smith's experiences with evangelist Joyce Meyer in front of 400,000 in India, combined with burgeoning success as a songwriting partner to artists such as Michael W. Smith, Matt Redman and Darlene Zschech, led him to wonder what could happen if he got a bunch of his songwriting friends together in the same place at the same time. Especially with a bigger purpose in mind: to create songs, and essentially give the proceeds away, including the writers' publishing royalties.
'The team thing'
To Martin Smith's astonishment, those friends said "yes," with virtually no hesitation.
"I actually got a call from Martin in the middle of 2006 telling me about the idea," says Israel Houghton, the Houston-based artist/worship leader known for his soulful, cross-genre musical style. "When he said he wanted to get together in the Scottish highlands for a week to write and then give it all away, I'm like, 'Tell me where to be.' "
Houghton wasn't the only one to respond to Martin Smith's call, as the roster of writers who descended on Loch Tay in central Scotland in January 2008 grew to include Redman, Zschech, Michael W. Smith, Paul Baloche, Steven Curtis Chapman, Stu Garrard from Delirious?, Tim Hughes, Graham Kendrick, Andy Park and Chris Tomlin.
The week that followed, say some of the project's principals, creatively exceeded what any of them could have imagined going in.
"I think what's been really mind-blowing about this whole project is the team thing," says Martin Smith. "The concept that 'two is better than one,' and in this case '12 is better than two.' Then to take that even further, you have other artists singing on the project, so you've got a team of almost 20 people.
"The idea of even getting four or five people of that caliber in the same space for a week would be enough, but I think that was just kind of a mini miracle. We put that week aside and everybody said, 'I'm in.' Everybody paid for their own flight to get there."
Once everyone arrived, though, Smith says, the real weight of the project kicked in — in a good way.
"I'm looking around the room, thinking 'I can't quite believe this is actually happening.' Then we're sitting there thinking, 'Oh my gosh, now we've actually got to come out with something. We've actually got to write some songs. Anybody got any?' " Smith laughs.
"Then we began the process and the more people got relaxed, the more music started coming out of people. I think it was just staggering to be in that mix and see what was going on."
And even for an artist as experienced and decorated as Michael W. Smith, the CompassionArt writing sessions had a profound effect, effectively changing the way he approaches music-making, he says.
"I promise when I say this, it was one of the most amazing times of my career," says the singer, who was recently announced as one of the newest members of the Gospel Music Hall of Fame. "In all the things I've done, and I've traveled all over and been with presidents and won awards, this one is very much at the top of what I'll remember the rest of my life. Because it was life changing for all of us.
"The temperature and the vibe of what we were in the middle of . . . we'd sort of find ourselves overcome with having little meltdowns every day over how unprecedented what we were doing was," he continues. "I think it was because we knew that none of what we were doing was going to benefit us at all in terms of (finances). So we found ourselves kind of being changed, like a picture perfect of the body of Christ.
"But here you found us all falling in love with each other, doing something together and no one person took credit for any of the songs," Smith says of the project, for which all of the songwriters received equal credit. "We were all the 'writers' whether we wrote a note on them or not, and everything will be relinquished. There was something awesome about that, plus we all got along. It was sort of a love fest for five days."
It's a tall order, getting a dozen relative strangers together in a room for five days, each with their different skill sets and methods of working, and expecting them to come up with anything cohesive. But the overarching purpose of the CompassionArt project, embodied in the album's subtitle, "Creating Freedom From Poverty," drove the songwriters' desire to create.
"We discovered that we had something very real on our hands. The first couple of days was just sort of that awkward dance that comes with meeting new people," Houghton says. "Day one, you say 'I have this idea.' Day two, it turns into 'What if we . . . ?' And by day three, it's everybody's thing. Everybody lost individual ownership and bought into corporate ownership in about 48 hours time."
That intent toward "corporate ownership," Houghton says, meant that creative rules were essentially absent — the group would just focusing on writing, whether that meant pop songs, worship songs, soul music, folk music or otherwise.
"(We'd) just bring it all and see where it ends up," he says. "By day three, Martin pulls me and (Michael W. Smith) aside and says, 'I think we have a record here. Would you guys help make that happen?'
"And I say, 'Sure, on one condition. That we do it at Abbey Road.' And what's amazing is that we rang up studios in London and Abbey Road was the only one available in that time period."
Making it work
If there's a pilgrimage destination for lovers of popular music, it might be the studios located at No. 3 Abbey Road in the city of Westminster, England. Almost every note The Beatles recorded in a studio were captured in this building, a fact not lost on Houghton as they prepared for recording sessions over a three-day span in February 2008.
"It only crossed my mind, maybe, two or three hundred times," he says, laughing at the memory. "Anybody who listened to Beatles records when they were young hopes to record at Abbey Road someday. To actually do it, you think 'Did this just happen?'
"When they say the ghosts are in there, they're not kidding. You just tap into some tones and vibes and you sit at the 'Lady Madonna' piano, and you realize this is the real thing."
The project's architects started shaping their songs within those music-friendly confines, ranging from driving rockers such as "We Won't Stay Silent" to the springy funk of "Shout Praise," from the bluesy stomp of "Fill My Cup" to the haunting honorific of "Highly Favoured," meshed with the hopeful energy provided by the Watoto Children's Choir on the project's bookends, opener "Come To the Water" and closer "There Is Always a Song."
All told, 12 of the CompassionArt songs were given form in that marathon recording session, with an additional three recorded in Nashville with guest artists such as Kirk Franklin, Amy Grant, Joel Houston, Leeland Mooring, Christy Nockels, tobyMac and CeCe Winans adding their talents to the mix, all waiving fees and royalties to contribute to the growing list of causes the charity project was compiling.
The original dozen songwriters arranged to distribute the proceeds from the project equally in two areas: one half to a set of projects they agreed on collectively, and the other half to individual causes close to their hearts.
With the influx of modern worship music making its way into churches, hymn books and services around the world, much of it generated by this very same set of songwriters, the potential for millions of dollars in proceeds exists across the lifetime of the songs' copyrights. It was a fact not lost on the songwriters' and guest vocalists' publishers and managers, not to mention Christian Copyright Licensing International, the global body charged with monitoring copyrights within the church system.
At virtually any point, one spoke in the complicated wheel of the music business could have sprung and derailed the entire project. But, as Martin Smith points out, when presented with the vision of what a project like this could accomplish, even the most fiscally minded music exec got on board.
"We all know that if you get a song into the 'church system,' which is a blessing and a curse to the church; it's wonderful and it can be distracting," Smith says. "If two or three of these become (like) 'Amazing Grace' and are still being sung in a hundred years' time, what an amazing result that could be. Not just financially, but in terms of leaving the church songs that came out of this retreat, together with this spirit of wanting to give everything away."
Hurdles, however, still remain.
While they've created a record and a book, and hope to play shows and produce a live DVD, "If we don't end up giving any money away, it will actually end up being really tragic," Smith says. "It would just become a glorified record company project.
"We're very mindful of that. I don't know the answer of how we can get around that unless people start giving serious cash to us to help us on our way, because the costs of running everything are more than what we're going to receive certainly in the first two years. It's a balancing act, but I do believe God's in it ultimately. What more can I say? I think he's asked us to do this, and he's going to make it work.
"There's your headline: 'He's ordered it, he's got to pay for it.' "
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