Expedition Remix By Don Chaffer

I am a huge fan of Don and Lori Chaffer, and have loved their music as solo artists and as Waterdeep. Don produced my 'album for parents', Station Wagon, and later helped me produce a hymns project with my dad, Dwight Colbaugh, called Beautiful Story. So, it was really fun to hand three tracks over to Don from Floodplain to create remixes.

Expedition had entirely different verses at first.  I recorded the vocal with Brown Bannister, but felt like the lyric was too broad and rambling.  On a different trip to Nashville I went back into Brown's to rerecord the vocal for Expedition. The first version was about technology, homelessness, pushing back against utility and pragmatism - it was just too big!  When I thought about it more, the main corridor to having good boundaries, to the capacity to see and value other human beings, and to life beyond useful=good, was Sabbath.  I see the city as the dream of man, a symbol of what we make and do, and the river (in my case, the Mississippi) as the dream of God, a symbol of what he can make, and what he invites us into. 

This song was also largely inspired by the writings of Makoto Fujimura. 

Original Verse 1:

can you feel the waves in the atmosphere

building up the way it is

can you feel the hum of the big machines

it's a story that you just can't miss

when the means to an end is justified

utility truth can't be denied

Original Verse 2: 

what is the point a cardinal's song

the poem with a poignant line

what do we do with the 'useless' men

the ones with the trouble inside

when the dream of God and the dream of man

mix in the marrow of the promised land