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New Songbook Expected by End of Weekend
Thu., Oct. 29. 2020 12:40pm EDT
J. Jackson, lead singer and lyricist for ApologetiX here again.
Our new digital songbook is finally finished after seven months of work! The previous edition had 610 pages; the new edition has almost 1000! We are currently checking it over one last time for typos.
We expect it to be available by the end of this weekend. We'll make an announcement on our website, on Facebook, and via email.
The new edition will feature about 200 more songs than the previous one, which was published in 2016. I'd prefer to do new editions every two years, and we actually had done a lot of work on a 2018 edition, but we just had too much other stuff going on, and before we knew it, it was outdated.
The 2020 edition has a lot of other bonus features, too. We've beefed up the "J.'s Journal" entries, where I tell the stories behind the songs. I was shocked when I looked at some of the older entries in the previous songbook and only saw a brief paragraph for many of them. Now every song entry is full-length, and I've included a lot of anecdotes from our travels and recording sessions.
We've also added a new index where you can reference our parodies by the years when the song they spoofed became hits. Of course, we still have the previous indexes, by parody title, original song title, original artist, subject(s), scripture references, and whatever single and CD(s) they were on.
You'll also find sections with photos from our 25th-Anniversary concert in Pittsburgh and our 25th-Anniversary Midwest concert in Green Bay, plus other photos of the band members in action in the indexes. Furthermore, this edition includes a number of new special-feature articles with more photos.
Finally, there is a section that includes copies of the "original lyrics in progress" for 40 of our best loved songs, like "The Real Sin Savior," "Life Restored," and "Bethlehemian Rhapsody." You'll be able to see how those parodies developed, with alternate lines that were considered, rejected, modified, etc.
Now, because all of the song entries, album entries, and indexes had to be hyper-linked, we needed to have a hard cut-off date for the songs. There are many thousands of links that connect the songs to the various indexes. If we hadn't set a definitive end point, we would've had to update the indexes every time we released a new single, and doing all those links takes weeks of work!
Consequently, the new edition will only run through the end of May 2020. When we started this project, I thought we'd probably have the songbook out soon after that. I didn't know that I'd wind up expanding almost 500 other previous journal entries. But we think you'll like the trade-off because of the heavily expanded coverage.
In case you're wondering, I've already been keeping up on the new song entries for our 30th anniversary edition, which we hope to release in 2022. That way they'll be ready and waiting when the time comes, and we should be able to do a much quicker turnaround from start to finish.
In the meantime, though, once you see the upcoming 2020 edition, we think you'll agree that it blows away all previous editions. We'll let you know as soon as it's available.
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