Dieve Tylos by James Metelak and Friends

It's been a dream of mine to create a Lithuanian album of my songs since at least 2012 when I shared some of my songs at a small group, but my Lithuanian accent was quite bad and I don't actually speak Lithuanian, so I resigned myself to never actually making the project until a year or ago when I was invited to play on the Lithuanian radio station XFM and they offered to help me record an album. At that point, my goal was to record an English album but since I'd already have all the music tracked, to just invite my Lithuanian friends to sing translations of the songs over the same music, thus creating two albums at once. But that recording opportunity didn't materialize, and so I eventually just decided to record a bunch of the songs myself.

At first I thought to myself, should I really spend my time on this? I mean, I'm all about writing your own songs, I think that each village and town and church should have their own songs and that they should sing them, and although I like translating things, in the end, I feel like the translations that are more needed are translations from languages like Lithuanian rather than to Lithuanian, because most Lithuanians are already singing translations, especially in churches. Which is crazy, because Lithuanians are one of the most musically-talented nations on the planet.

In the end though, I decided to try, and to make things more interesting and less about me, realized that 1)other people should sing these songs 2)each song should be sung by a different person 3)through this I would have a lot of opportunities to coach people through recording, singing, and translating. It was completely worth it.

It's my hope that these songs will be challenging and encouraging; that their honesty and artistry will challenge Lithuanian songwriters to write more and better songs that will speak to the hearts of the people around them. It was a lot of time and work from a lot of people, but I spent less than 100 EUR to translate these songs, record them, do the album art, the lyric videos; it was about two months of part-time work. No, the songs aren't perfect, and there are probably some mistakes; but I like them that way. This is where we're at; prayers aren't always pretty, but they should be honest.

Some of these songs were recorded and even re-tweaked or re-translated in a quick 2-hour meeting. Some of the singers only had a day or two to learn the songs. Most of these songs were recorded completely live using my small mic recorder. Some of them were translated via video chat while I was in Lithuania and my Lithuanian friends were in the UK. The only two songs recorded in a studio are Čia Esu and Dieve Tylos. The rest were done using a small recorder that Will Campbell gave me a few years back. Considering all that, I am really pleased with what we have here.

Indie-folk Acoustic Singer-Songwriter Multilingual World Traveler Music That is Sometimes to God, and sometimes not.