Well GMA Week is off to a fast start as usual. Even though this is my 7th time here, I never seem to feel fully prepared for the week and everything there is to choose between doing. Today seemed particularly hectic as I got a late start to the day after getting out of church in Franklin, TN this morning. (I flew in yesterday and stayed with a friend last night.) When I got to the hotel this afternoon, I opened my rental car door to see Brenten Gilbert and Chris Unthank walking up to the hotel to check in. A few minutes later, a breathless Nancy Berg (newly married, formerly Nancy Koning), our CMCentral Photographer, rushed into the lobby to tell me that she had lost her cell phone somewhere in the last five hours. She had been retracing her steps since the morning trying to find it and hadn’t been able to call me for a ride. She and her sister had to take a taxi instead, but Nancy was more worried about the missing phone than anything else. Inside the hotel, they said our room wouldn’t be ready for another 30 minutes (30 minutes we really didn’t have time to spare, but oh well…) - I guess the wait was worth it to get a room with a micro-fridge. Brenten and his friends got into their room and back down again before we even made it up to our room. Finally though, we got checked in, and then took off for the Renaissance Hotel (RH), the main “headquarters” of all things GMA, to get our media badges and see how many of the half-dozen concurrently scheduled events we could make it to within a few hours. On our way over, I noticed another guy walking backwards to videotape a girl in front of us. Somehow I knew we wouldn’t be the only people here videoblogging the events of the week. (Check for the first episode sometime later today on our front page Video Player.) As soon as we got over to the RH, the first person I ran into was former CMC editor, Robin Parrish… with a video camera in his hand. See, I knew this was going to be a popular idea for this year.
After some tweaks to our technical setup with the video camera, I took off for the Word Label Group New Media Networking Event at the Global Cafe. It sounded like a techno-geek fest (right up my alley), but wasn’t what I expected at all. It was mostly a bunch of people and artists mingling around, eating these REALLY HUGE cookies and drinking free coffee. I didn’t win the free iPod Shuffle, but I did get to meet a couple of nice folks. I also caught up with Sean von Tagen, our CMC head honcho, and after a little while we took off for a dinner at Jack’s BBQ with Hillsong United. Nancy met us there and again, we were in a crowded room with a lot of people and artists, but really no direction of what to do besides eat dinner. (Maybe we missed the introductions at the beginning or something.) We were able to pick a few faces out of the crowd and eventually which artists were from Hillsong United, among all the spikey-haired people in the room. Artists in general are dead giveaways around Nashville - ESPECIALLY during GMA Week. They keep the hair gel companies in business.
Nancy headed over to the Ryman to meet up with her sister who was saving us seats for the Worship Service, but I headed over to the McCain & Co Guitar Pull. I made the last few songs and got to see “The President,” a George W. Bush impersonator, sing a funny song. By the end of the Guitar Pull though, I realized my camera battery was dead and I had put my spare one in the wrong bag. So back to the Holiday Inn it was (not a super-short trip). I ended up being about 30 minutes late for Worship, but I did get to see the band members from The Afters checking into the hotel. We hung out with them late into the night last year after they had just won their Dove Award for New Artist of the Year. Turns out they still have the photographs from the ceremony on their computer that Nancy took and gave them, so that was cool to hear!
Worship was led this year by Hillsong United, and somewhat accompanied by Michael W. Smith. I don’t know many United worship choruses, so I didn’t know a lot of the music that they sang. I knew maybe 2-3 songs the whole night (”Above All” and one that Michael sang in church this morning). The surprise of the evening was that Michael brought out actor Jim Caviezel who played Jesus in The Passion of the Christ to share his story about the filming of that movie. It was a pretty moving story - telling of how Jim’s left shoulder actually was dislocated during the filming of the scene where he carried the cross. He had hypothermia for several months during the shooting, got scourged for real twice, had pneumonia, and got struck by lightning… to name a FEW of the trials Caviezel suffered. In the end though, he talked about how someone brought him a walkman with the new-at-the-time song “Above All” on it and he had them climb a ladder between each take to let him listen to that song over and over again on repeat. He said it had such a powerful impact on him and kept him warm despite the whipping winds that were giving him hypothermia.
We left worship just a few minutes early to get a good seat (and a power outlet!) during the Songwriter’s Showcase. We accomplished both and I filled my last few minutes of tape with clips of a few songwriters. The thing that’s different about that showcase is that it’s the people who WROTE the song singing it - which is not always the artist(s) who made the song famous.
Well it’s VERY late and I need to get to sleep now… more tomorrow!