Over the past 10 months or so I’ve been involved with what has become the most awesome project I’ve ever worked on. It’s actually been dozens of different projects but they all had one common theme – the new newsboys album, Born Again. Newsboys have long been one of my favorite bands… and this is one of their best albums ever.
I’ve worked on two newsboys albums in the past but this time around I was given a bit more creative freedom. Newsboys were working with a few new writers on this album – Juan Otero and Seth Mosley (The Write Brothers) who are both so nice and amazingly talented. I’m so thrilled I got to be a part of this project from it’s infancy when we were listening to Write Brothers demos at Inpop. I had the pleasure of going to a recording session at The Write Brother’s studio when they were tracking vocals for Born Again with Mike Tait way back in September of last year. Then around December of last year I started on the packaging, was involved in the cover shoot with my friend David Molnar (who is a crazy talented photographer) and then began the whirlwind press onslaught… I’m pretty sure I made over 100 banner ads, print ads, website splash pages, email templates and more to advertise the album.
Around early May I believe is when we finally finished packaging… which ended up almost exactly how I wanted it to look, which is rare. I also got to use a bunch of my live photos of newsboys from the 2 festivals they brought me to in Europe in the inside packaging. I love it when I get to use my own photos in my design work.
The album finally released last week to rave reviews and the best newsboys street week ever – 45,311 units. It was #4 on the Billboard overall chart, beneath only Sting, Eminem and MIA.
Right before we hit street date, July 13th, Juan Otero contacted me to do a website for the Write Brothers so they would have something online once the album dropped. I was thrilled to get to work with him yet again, and a few days ago we launched WriteBrosMusic.com. Check it out to hear some of The Write Brothers amazing work and keep up with their projects… you won’t want to miss anything that they work on!
