The "Sanctified" LP

Sanctified

I should clarify a few things before I go on with this entry. A couple of days ago, I found some old material on a now-unused hard drive from a previously blown up computer (!!), and on that drive contained some HTML stuff from an Awakening website I did over 10 years ago, which of course has been off-line for many, many years. Back when I was in the dying days of my band "One Hundred Days" I created a website for the band and included a few pages about The Awakening.

Being able to look through this information allowed me to see what I wrote 10 years ago, and in doing so, a few details came into focus. Here they are:

1. The Two Worlds album was officially recorded in the summer of 1986 and released on our own indie label "Slipp Discs" in the fall of 1986.

2. We signed to Reunion Records in early 1987. They apparently were sold on signing us from hearing only two songs off the Two Worlds album, "You Can't Hide" and "All You Need To Know."

3. We went into the studio to record "My Only Hope," "Distant Light," and re-mix "You Can't Hide" in the spring of 1987.

4. Distant Light was written by me, Andy and Al Powell. "My Only Hope" was credited to Andy and Mike Powell as writers.

5. It was also stated in my original notes, that Distant Light was one of the only songs The Awakening recorded on an album but never performed live. That explains a lot. A few days ago while driving in my car, I tried to sing along with this song and was exhausted and horse by half way through! I never would have been able to sing this song live to any great ability!

So that brings us up to date.

The Sanctified album was much the same as Two Worlds, but the order was obviously different. Here's how it was laid out:

Side One:

Cheesy Intro

You Can't Hide (re-mixed for radio)

All You Need To Know

My Only Hope

Two Worlds

Distant Light

Side Two:

Turn Them Away

Fireside

The Only Way

The Forest

The Sanctified album was released on vinyl and cassette in the summer of 1987.

My Only Hope was released as our first single and peaked at #6 on the CHR chart. This garnered us a large amount of press and record reviews. You Can't Hide, Turn Them Away and Distant Light were also released as singles and did quite well.

The elusive dream of having radio success in the Christian pop industry was not an easy road to maneuver. In the time between the release and success of our first album (1987) and the release of our second album (1988), many things would change in the radio market that would ultimately work against us.

The mid 1980's saw mainstream pop success coming to Christian artists, and thus the desire for market cross-over became a reality. I'm fairly certain that one of the reasons we were signed so quickly to Reunion Records was because we sounded more like a mainstream band than a Gospel band, and that gave us street credibility and cross-over potential.

But by 1988, the Christian market underwent a pulling back of the reigns due to a number of factors, one definitely being the magnitude of scandals caused by fallen idols of the Christian world such as Jim Bakker, Jimmy Swaggart and Oral Roberts. The Christian industry felt it should go back to what it knew it could sell - safe, straight up the middle Gospel music.

So when our follow-up album came out in 1988 containing very little in the way of overt, blunt Christian messages, we had a radio failure on our hands.

More on those days coming up soon!

But at this point, with a hit single and a critically acclaimed album on our hands, we were feeling pretty good about things. There certainly wasn't a lot of money rolling into our hands, and we still had a $15,000 debt to pay back, but we believed that we were on our way to a pretty solid future.

A tour of the USA would have been a good idea at this point, but for some reason it never happened. It likely had to do with the fact that we were in Canada, still had regular jobs, and would have probably been stuck on some money-losing opening slot on an American tour. I could be wrong about this, but I'm fairly sure that doing any major touring at this point was just not feasible, and Reunion was not able/willing to offer any tour support.

We did at least 1 promotional trip to Nashville, where we did media and interviews etc.

Back in Canada in the summer of 1987, The Awakening continued working on new material. We had this great place to practice, which we called "the Prac Shack." It was in a tiny place called Baden, Ontario. It was in this environment that we began writing songs for what would become our Into Thy Hands album. It was one of the most creative periods of our career.

Even by the time Sanctified was released, we had new material ready to go, but once the album was done, we had a very real reason to get the best new material we could for our follow-up album.

The year 1987, saw us doing many live gigs, which gave us great opportunities to try out new material on our audiences. Near the end of the year, we recorded an entire show featuring almost all new material. We sent those recordings to Reunion Records to get them committed to our next project with them. These songs were made in a very different way than anything we had done before.

More on that very creative, collaborative period coming up next!

Ian - June 8/09