“Life”
This album (and Parallel Stereo as a band) began on a 2016 summer trip that involved a lot of long hikes that always seemed to involve cliffs and drop-offs. Fortunately no one fell, and after the hikes Glen Galloway always managed to end up back on flat land where everyone decompressed for a couple hours. Every day God met Glen during this time. After nine straight days of this, on the plane flight home it became very apparent that everyday life needed to change. These deep drinks of hours spent alone with God really needed to continue. One verse in particular from Isaiah was still echoing: “If you have good news, get up to the mountain heights…lift up your voice with strength.”
Glen had two other bands going at this point (Octagrape and Sumatraban), and plenty to do at work, but early mornings were always relatively open. So he started meeting God in the studio for worship before anyone was there. Soon it just turned into spontaneous one-on-one worship in which the entire focus was the secret place Jesus talked about in the Sermon on the Mount. There was no agenda, it was just purely about connection.
“Father, you’re in the secret place, hear the sound ring out.”
The morning this spontaneous song happened (“Secret”) was the day the faucet turned on and the new songs started pouring out. God was revealing a new way of worshiping and writing out of intimacy, and all the songs were coming with powerful stories and life experiences connected to them. After a year of this, Glen started to wonder what was wrong…why none of this was finding it’s way to tape. All his other bands were writing and recording and releasing albums, while these songs were still just voice memos. Finally he reached out to Daniel Smith (his brother-in-law and co-veteran of many Danielson Famile/Soul-Junk tours in the late ’90s). A few short weeks later he was on a plane to south Jersey to track the beginnings of these songs at Familyre Studio with Daniel and on-fire Delaware drummer Paul More. Immediately after recording, Glen and Daniel and his wife Elin flew to Oslo to help lead worship. The whole experience was life-changing and life-defining.
On his return to San Diego, Glen started finding like-minded worshipers, and one by one he would invite them to early morning worship at the studio. The secret place gone public! Lori Obregon joined to sing, Jack Gillette agreed to drum, Alan Elftman wanted to play bass, Titus Haug added gusts of guitar whenever he was in town. A few months later Ben Parks joined on piano and John Van Deusen on vocals and guitar. Ben Moore started recording the band, filling in and around the sessions that had begun in south Jersey. Tåran Reidal (from the Oslo-based band Leonov) wrote and recorded additional vocals. Christian Stig-Bjørnø from Copenhagen contributed art for the cover.
As the album moved into final phases, God started pulling the whole project in an unexpected direction. He gave the band a vision of pouring out lavish worship on Jesus in third world orphanages. They started making day-trips into Mexico to play at orphanages, and began making connections in places like Eastern Europe, the Caribbean, Central America, and Southeast Asia.
As an album, Life documents this journey…this simultaneous call into the secret place and up to the cliff edges of the mountains. We have good news.
