Four Letters. Twelve Songs. One Story.

Sometimes a letter is like a prayer, written more for the sender than the receiver. There are unsent letters tucked away in dresser drawers and buried in boxes everywhere, serving as testimony that sometimes it’s enough to just write it down. You might have a letter of your own somewhere that nobody has ever seen.

But what if you opened the drawer? What if you did send that letter about your fears and insecurities, your hopes and triumphs?

Our family of songwriters and musicians in north San Diego county wrote songs about some of those letters, and we’ll be releasing ‘For The Sender’ on September 18, 2012. We asked the senders of the letters to choose a favorite charity, and a portion of the proceeds from sales and tours will benefit those causes. Join us as we make the journey of delivering the songs to the people who inspired them: you.

The Autumn

It was autumn when I got this letter from Emily, who I didn’t yet know but had somehow come across my songs. I was watching my dreams fall like the leaves on the limbs outside my window, barely hanging on before quietly drifting to the ground. And it wasn’t only my dreams. My best friend, a labrador named Kona, had recently succumbed to bone cancer with her head on my lap in my living room, and I was taking a hard look at my life as a result. Her death closed a chapter of my life, one of chasing dreams and retreating into solitude when things didn’t work out. I didn’t know what the next chapter looked like, but I did know that the leaves were doing a better job of letting go than I was.

The Shelter

Jon Foreman and I went to a homeless shelter for kids in Oceanside and spent some time playing guitars and hearing their stories. We went back again with our friend Jordan and more stories started to emerge about these kids’ lives… stories of separation, abuse, and resilience. We started writing songs like ‘Unbroken’ based on what we heard.

Kim, the director of the shelter, sent us a thank you note for stopping by and I wrote her back asking about why she got involved with homeless kids. This is the letter I got back, which inspired 'Love Began As A Whisper' and 'The Right Words.'

The Search

Haiti was crumbling as the new year started and I was asked to contribute a song to a Haiti benefit record, so I wrote ‘Rescue,’ which told the story of a both a spiritual and physical search and rescue. It was more autobiographical than I would admit at the time, and while the song wasn’t used, this video of relief efforts paired with the song made it onto the Facebook page of Alison Thompson, who was working as a medic for Sean Penn’s Foundation in Haiti. Alison was also a first responder to 9/11, instrumental in the Southeast Asia tsunami relief, and as I soon learned, a beautiful woman committed to serving humanity in beautiful ways. A colonel let her onto a military computer in the special ops tent outside Port Au Prince and she sent me this email after seeing the video.

The Well

Sadness is like water held in a well, carved deep into the ground of everyday life. Sometimes the well is emptied suddenly, maybe by a car wreck or an unexpected fast-moving illness. The water dumps in sheets over the edge and onto the ground and everyone left behind stands around waist-deep in sadness doing what they can to get rid of it, when all they can really do is just wait.

In this case, the well was emptied without warning just before Christmas when a young police officer in Oceanside was gunned down by a gang member, leaving behind a widow and an infant son. Amidst the television news reports I realized that only a few weeks before the shooting, the-soon-to-be widow had come by my house with a mutual friend. Her name was Katelyn, and as time went by, her new husband let her know that we were writing songs based on letters I’ve received. She wrote me her own letter and...