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By Doug Van Pelt

Two years ago, when we brought Jason Dodd on board as an Assistant Editor, I became rejuvinated. My love for writing re-surfaced after a long absence of going through the motions. Being challenged by another great writer does that for ya. One of the byproducts of this rejuvination was the inspiration to write three stories -- or interview three people. Those three were Bill Power (who, along with his experience in one of the Northwest's early 90s punk bands, Blenderhead, was also right alongside Brandon Ebel for T&N's formative years); Chuck Cummings (who has played drums with a ton of bands, from Common Bond to Dakota Motor Co to Aunt Bettys to Silage), which was written by Jeff Cloud and included the first "exhaustive timeline" that accompanies some of our "definitive" articles on seminal artists of our time; and the last was David Zaffiro (who helped found Christian metal pioneers Bloodgood and produced the first three Holy Soldier records). This last one has yet to see the printed page, but I figured it was time to pull this out as a special treat for our website's "Online Exclusives." Read on as the questions and answers flow as freely as the espresso at the Starbucks near Franklin, TN...

Doug: Ok. You're doing... You're producing some worship albums, right? How much engineering oversight are you doing with the worship album? I mean, you are obviously there when it is being recorded...

David: Uh huh...

Doug: How do you keep... how do you find out magic is happening without getting into it yourself? Worship is a very positive thing where you can get caught up in it, and being a producer you almost have to be divorced from all that and you've got to know what's going on with all the... how much engineering oversight do you give when you are recording something like this and how do you know when to capture the magic? How involved do you get in just being a participant in the worship yourself? What's it like doing a worship album?

David: (laughs) Well, it's... first of all, umm... I don't know. To be honest... I got involved in worship records through John Mays... Do you know who John Mays is?

Doug: Yeah.

David: He's a label writer at ahh... At the time he was a label writer at Starsong with EMI before they shutdown our label. He talked to me about doing the Kim Hill record... actually it was a solo record...

Doug: Uh huh.

David: Then somehow it spun into a direction of well... Kim's the new Renewing Your Heart worship director... What about that live? And I'm like, ‘‘Hmmmm... that's interesting,' so we did that.

Doug: Ok.
David: And really it was a matter of me CATCHING UP, to be honest. That's coming to the Passion Records, which was completely John's brainchild, (he) really came to me because ‘‘Passion' was in full swing, but nobody that I know of had considered to record... John did, so again I was just catching up. So I know that sounds...

David continues after interruption: Alright... anyway I was going to say... that ahh... I was just kinda catching up in that regard. It's like, ‘‘God why are you using me to do worship records?' There's a lot of people who are true worshipers in Nashville, that love God, and I... I mean... I worship... at Church, but I didn't think of myself as... I just thought there were a lot better guys that could do it, to be honest, and so it really kind of freaked me out, but I was really honored -- extremely honored. Rick Elias came to me and talked to me once in passing... I don't even know if he'd remember this, but he said something about, ‘‘Man, you are going to be doing such and such and such and such,' about future work or whatever and some pretty... you know... whatever... I don't know how to explain that, but some, like, secular things... I think that was what he was doing -- working on ‘‘That Thing You Do' or just after. He said something about that... I was working on the Kim Hill worship record and I felt like, I told him, I responded to him... it was in a Mexican restaurant out here... and I said ‘‘Hey, I feel like I am doing it... I'm doing it right now, this is it, this is as high as it gets.' You know? Since then I've went through certain changes, so... but to answer your question, I feel like on the worship records I'm really just catching up. ‘‘Passion 2' : I got to go out to Texas and do some pre-production and that sort of thing with the band, the worship band, and kinda take a look at what they are doing or whatever, but it was really them just allowing me to come in and see what they are doing... In the truck where we recorded it ... Malcolm Harper was the engineer and Real Sound is the name of the company and they came in and did all the recording. Very expensive truck... Malcolm did a great job. I just kicked back, Johnny and I cracked jokes, took notes of what songs, and we'd sift through 70 songs. Now after that, when I got it back to Nashville there was a ton of editing, and cleaning up, and tuning, and umm... as little overdubs as I possibly could do, cause I really felt like that could TAKE AWAY real quick. If it needed it, fine ya know, the first record really needed it. (The) first ‘‘Passion' record really needed some overdubs. Kim Hill's needed some overdubs, um... and she actually did some vocal overdubs, not much -- but a couple. ‘‘Passion 2' had next to none, and because of that there was a real moment that was captured... not because of no overdubs, but there was a moment. And John Mays and I... I tell ya, we were just like, we were just there. There was something God was doing, and I'm not just trying to spiritualize this, I mean this is true, man. It was something God was doing and we got the liberty of being able to record it. There's one point where we were standing out in the audience and there's 11,000 college students singing acapella and it's changing songs in between and it's slipping across like water. It was just hitting us like, ‘‘Whoa!' ... It was like ‘‘waaaa,' and they go into another song, and you could just hear it ripple across 11,000 people and then it would come over to the bleachers to you. It was just awesome.

Doug: Wow.

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