Me and the Evening Sky
Alli Rogers
I’ve tried telling my story from the beginning and I keep getting stuck, so I’ve decided to start at today and work backwards. Today I am staring out at the Shelby Street Bridge in Nashville, Tennessee, which has been my home for six years now. I live in a sea of other songwriters, in a city that does it’s share of sleeping, but never stops playing music. And though it is far away from my hometown of Cedar Falls, Iowa, I feel settled here. Today I am a moderately stable person… I’m drinking some caffeine, which I never do, in hopes that I will get inspired to get all kinds of work done. The work I need to get done is mostly related to the new record I just finished called You and the Evening Sky. I am so excited about the record, the kind of excited I get when I’ve just finished a batch of chocolate chip cookies and am watching the face of a friend take their first bite (I take cookies pretty seriously). Music has been a winding road for me and at times the trappings of business, travel, and career have clouded the art I started out loving. But I’m finding my way, and I think that this batch of songs are some of the best I’ve done. They touch on the realities of love, the mysteries of faith, and the connections we make with people and places here on earth. One is inspired by hearing Brennan Manning speak, another by a friend’s blog, a haunting photograph of a deteriorating ship, a conversation with an old roommate. There is a song called Don’t Wash Your Hands of Me that I wrote after visiting children in Ecuador through an organization called Compassion International. It is trips like this one that remind me how connected we all are, and how thankful I am for the music that seems to connect us further.
I grew up singing songs in church, slowly learning how to hold a microphone and do something other than sway back and forth to the accompaniment track. Picking up the guitar was a whole different approach for me, which I started trying out at the age of 13. I began writing my own songs and performing them for events at church and around town. The summer before my junior year in high school, I was offered a record deal, by Word Records in Nashville. To me it felt as out of the blue as that sentence just sounded. I thought I knew something of music, but I knew absolutely nothing of the music business. The next couple years were a crash course in the business as I co-wrote with all sorts of Nashville writers and met with industry executives. I finished a record just in time for Word to be bought by a larger record label, which put my project on hold. A year later I was label-less, record-less, and searching for my voice as an artist and writer. This time of odd jobs, late nights recording with friends, and the absence of deadlines and requirements led to my first independent record Always Eden. Eden was a very introspective record full of songs that served a very remedial purpose in my life. A year later I released my second record called The Day of Small Things. Like Eden, this was recorded with friend and producer, Donnie Boutwell. I spent the next couple years after the release of Small Things touring and playing shows with my guitar, opening for other artists and playing some on my own. This last fall I met a talented artist/producer named Don Chaffer (Waterdeep) and we recorded a song together at his studio in Kansas City, which led to us making You and the Evening Sky (to be released later this spring).
Some people say the last thing the world needs is another song. But I don’t think the world could ever have too many songs. I am excited to be in an age where music is changing and more people are able to record and release music than ever before. The reason I have chosen to keep adding to the sea of tones and frequency’s is simply because I still feel compelled to write and sing and create.
Frederick Buechner says, “Who can say when or how it will be that something easters up out of the dimness to remind us of a time before we were born and after we will die?”
There are so many things about life I don’t understand. The least of these would be the internet, tornados, baking soda.and the most incomprehensible would of course be God the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. But music has filled so many of the moments that seem to “easter up out of the dimness” for me. Moments where heaven seems closer, the moon seems touchable. I hope in some small way these new songs will fill some of those spaces for you as they have for me. Thank you for reading and listening!
-Alli
