The Story of Take My Life
On December 16th 2013, I felt compelled to re-write the old hymn “Take My Life & Let It Be”. Why you ask? Because, that day, I suddenly realized that the original melody was a very poor match for the glorious lyrics penned by Frances Havergal.
The very next morning, a new melody for “Take My Life” popped into my head. An embryonic little two-line song with 4 verses was birthed that very day. I copied it on pink paper and “Take My Life” became affectionately known as the pink song.
It wasn’t much of a song, and I didn’t think much about it. But in December 2016, I was playing the little song, and my wife said, “You know, that a very beautiful song. If you ever wrote a chorus for it, you might have something.” So I quickly wrote a chorus which was NOT VERY GOOD. And the resultant four-line little song seemed quite disjointed.
But, two years prior, Jeff Nelson, my pal in Nashville with 500+ song credits, had asked me to co-write more songs with him because of the strong success we had with our first song “Forever His Blood”.
So, in January 2017, I sent my rinky-dink little “Take My Life” to Jeff with EXTREMELY LOW EXPECTATIONS.
Surprisingly, Jeff liked it and thought it had a ton of potential. When I heard Jeff’s first revamp, I knew we were on to something. From there, the ideas flowed fast and furious out of both our heads and “Take My Life” was done in just a few days.
We quickly sent a demo of “Take My Life” to LIFEWAY. They instantly liked it and decided to publish it under their “Glory Songs” label in Sept 2018.
The choral recording above was done by LIFEWAY on May 7th, 2018 in Nashville.
But already a few churches in Texas, and one in North Carolina, have found out about “Take My Life” and have said “We wanna do it ASAP. Send us a piano copy and we will make do.
Only time will tell what kind of reception and usage “Take My Life” will have in churches across America.