NASHVILLE (BP) — Last week, lying in bed, music arranger and producer David Wise had an idea. Like seemingly everyone else in the world, he was troubled by the ongoing crisis of the COVID-19 pandemic and wondered how he might help.
Today, that moment of inspiration has encouraged more than a million people. The video of singers joining together on the hymn “It Is Well with My Soul,” produced by Wise, was released only yesterday (March 25), and its exponential impact caught him off guard.
“Our intention was we felt God was prompting us to release this song,” Wise told Baptist Press. “Not knowing that in 24 hours, we would have a million views. … Every five minutes another church is wanting to stream it. Radio stations are wanting to play this for people.”
The project started as a way to encourage his friends.
“I was just overcome with the spirit of the song ‘It Is Well,’” Wise said. “The Lord laid that song on my heart. I just said, ‘Wouldn’t it be so cool if right now, we were able to find a way to make music in a time when we can’t be together anymore?’”
He called a friend who is a music engineer and asked if the idea just might work — or if his friend thought he was crazy.
“I’ll do the dirty work,” he told his friend. “I’ll do the arrangement. I’ll make it as easy as I possibly can. Can we do it?”
His friend liked the idea and agreed to help. Things went very quickly after that.
“This song feels anointed,” Wise said, “I can’t even remember doing the arrangement. I sat down, and in less than two hours, I had it. My hands cannot manipulate something like that.”
He divided the arrangement into parts and sent a different part to each of 31 Nashville studio singers he works with regularly. Each singer got an email with the full arrangement chart, the part they were supposed to sing, and an example audio track of their part, which they could listen to as they sang to ensure they stayed on the beat.
“Every single solo and the choir is 100 percent recorded on cell phones,” Wise said.
After each singer recorded their part, Wise pieced them all together.
Source: Baptist Press
All Content & Images are provided by the acknowledged source