In late 1997, I was given a tape. On this tape was a sound I had never before heard. It was dark. It was aggressive. It spoke about things in my life in a way I had never heard before. It was a cassette tape of Living Sacrifice’s “Reborn.” It not only introduced me to Christian Metal, it introduced me to Metal as a whole. I had finally found a form of music that conveyed to me the might and power of God, and it made me proud to be a Christian, and opened up my mind to a form of expression I had longed for long before I even knew it existed.

The tape opens with a long drone, tribal drums beating in the background, until it all builds up to a short silence, which is then filled with a drum fill that is seemingly unhuman. It was the first time I learned of Lance Garvin, and only the beginning of a deep respect and awe of him. The song begins with a musical might of a legion of angels, while the vocalist, Bruce Fitzhugh, screamed with an intense passion lyrics that were simple, but God-breathed.

Reborn empowered
All strongholds broken
Old ways have died,
Given new life
Boldness engulfs my every word,
Strength empowered by God

I had spent many years in churches, and never once heard a battle cry like that. There’s no tremble in the words spoken, no wavering in the stance. Backed by a blast of guitars and drums, those were are screamed into the depths of hell and back. Living Sacrifice had shown me that something the prefix of “Christian” didn’t have to mean “second rate rip-off.”

Living Sacrifice will always have a big place in my heart. Not only has their music always moved and inspired me, but their members have been inspirations to me. Lance Garvin is an incredible drummer, with speed, accuracy and power. And the band’s frontman, Bruce Fitzhugh, has long been a model for the life I wanted. He fronted an amazing Christian metal band, when not with LS, he produced other awesome Christian metal acts, and he’s a family man (so much so it led to the band’s breakup in 2003.)

Now that I’ve explained all that, you can understand that I have become very excited at their announcement to do a reunion tour and record a new album. They’re playing in Atlanta on June 27th.

I was very excited.

Tonight Teresa, practically through tears, explained that we’ll be on a plane that night going to Florida for her cousin’s wedding. They play in Florida on the 28th, but it’s an hour away, and it’s during the wedding. She then drove the knife deeper when she pointed out that on the 28th, in Florida, I could bring along my best friend/former metal bandmate Rob to the show with me…if I could go. Which I can’t. Life is very frustrating. I continually feel like I want simple things, and they keep getting stripped away from me. It’s never anything horrible, but having one little thing after the other fall through on you gets really overwhelming after a while. It sucks.

Filed under: music, rambling, spirituality by tonybullard
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My house has been especially musical lately. Today Noah finally started playing his xylophone correctly, with mallet in hand, rather than with flattened palms, which was never very effective. He’s been swinging drumsticks for a while now, something I’ve shown in previous videos, but his control has really improved, and I guess the xylophone progress indicates he’s managed to grasp the concept of a stick or mallet being used to play an instrument.

I recently set up my keyboard to play drum sounds, so Noah could bang away at that, but as mentioned earlier, he thinks it’s like the xylophone, and has started whacking at the keyboard with a drumstick. This makes a very loud “something is about to break” kind of sound, that makes me unhappy. My buddy Juan reminded me of my DD55 packed away in my garage, and I have to stay, I’m greatly in debt to him now. I’m not sure why I didn’t think about it. When I use to play it (back before I got my electronic set) I always said I’d pass it on to my kid when he/she wanted to learn. So at 5:15 I sat Noah down with it, and I finally had to pull him away at 5:45 to feed him dinner, and he wasn’t happy about it at all. I’ve never seen anything keep his attention for 30 minutes. He just whacked away at it, making all sorts of noise, favoring his left hand, and switching one stick between hands rather than holding two sticks at the same time. I must say, there’s little Noah could do to make me happier. I want him to be musical, never intended to force anything on him, but I never in my life expected him to be picking this stuff up so fast.

On the non-Noah side of things (for once) I’ve been making a lot more music lately than I use to. I haven’t posted anything here, as little of it for general listening audiences. I’ve taken up with minusdrums.com, a website devoted to metal and rock guitars tracks, left without drums so drummers can play along as practice. I’ve managed to sell 22 tracks thus far, which is about 21 more songs than I’ve sold in my whole life. Turns out people can actually make money from selling music they’ve made. What a novel idea.

Problem is, I keep swapping back and forth between drumming and playing/recording guitar, and my hands are taking quite a beating. Thursday night I had to soak my hands in ice water due to blisters and pains from drumming too much. Tonight, my fingers hurt from playing to much guitar. I’m glad to be playing, but man is it taking it’s toll on me.

The final note in this music-centric post is a new band. I’ve formed a duo with a fella from Israel. We’ve thus far completed one song, and are both excited to work on more. It’s a long, and arduous writing process, recording, uploading to the net, waiting for response, over and over again, but it’s working surprisingly well considering. I’m quite proud of the new song, and hope the next few will come out a little quicker.

Well, this has gotten entirely too long. I’ll talk some more later about the new band, and ideas I have for trying to gain some ground on the ever-expansive internet. My fingers now hurt from typing to much. I’m falling apart. Sigh.

Filed under: family, general, music by tonybullard
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I think they get away with too much. Think about it: If you were typing at your computer, and someone walked up and started smashing his hand on your keyboard, how would you react? You’d be all, “What the heck?!” But for some reason babies get this free pass to do whatever they want. That doesn’t seem right to me.

And then, after that jerk messes up what you’re typing, he craps his pants, and screams at you until you clean him up.

And he won’t stop hitting your keyboard (the musical kind) with a drumstick. He’s going to break it. And when he does, will this deadbeat live-in who doesn’t pay rent get a job to pay to fix it? No. See? Jerks.

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Well, sorta. He was doing it pretty consistently, but true to form, he stops once the camera comes out. He’s so modest.

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“Yesterday I found him with a water bottle cap completely inside his mouth.”

“Yeah, sorry, I kinda let him play with those”

“They’re like the perfect size for him…to…to die.”

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I normally don’t blog about stuff I find on the internet, because I feel like it’s probably been blogged by a million people already, and no one comes to my site for news or anything, but sometimes I just have to mention some things.

Above is a picture of a Pocket Mod. It’s one piece of A4 paper, folded into a wallet sized 8 page booklet. The website has a widget so that you can put together your own, customizing each page as you wish. There’s also a little program that you can download to turn any 8 paged pdf into a Pocket Mod, so you can make a little booklet for just about anything you want. Fitness logs, contacts, whatever.

I was instantly struck at how perfect this would be for any sort of camp or retreat setting. You could have the weekend schedule printed out, a menu for the cafeteria, list out the rules, maybe even info on who’s in charge and whatnot. It would be a really easy way to keep everybody on task and informed.

The thing I like the most about it is that being only one sheet of paper, it’s easily replaceable if lost or gets worn out, and doesn’t cost a fortune to make a bunch of them.

Anyways, this is the end of me being overly excited about a folded piece of paper.

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Happy St. Patty’s Day!

What?!? You didn’t wear green?

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