This Second Chance Took Thirty Years

John James was raised in Far North Queensland, in a town so Sicilian it was nicknamed Little Italy. His father Frank was first-generation and charismatic, and he was running a double life around an illegal gambling book. His mother Joy left. At four, an aunt and uncle took him in.

In 1979 a man named Graham pulled up in a rattling van and invited him to a youth club that had food. John got in the van. What he found there was Jesus, and everything else in this story runs on that.

His father found the same faith later, on a road to Damascus of his own, and came back to lead the family to Christ. John doesn't soften what that means.

He was eighteen, at a friend's birthday party in Queensland, when he met a drummer named Peter Furler. Peter and a couple of mates were starting a band and needed a singer. John's account of how he got the job hasn't softened in forty years.

“I elected myself. I thought, crikey, how hard can it be? We're not working for NASA here.”

They rehearsed every Saturday in Peter's parents' garage, which John says they “graciously confiscated,” and called themselves The News until somebody pointed out that Huey Lewis had got there first, so they became the Newsboys instead. Wes Campbell, who ran a five dollar Friday night Christian coffee shop on the Sunshine Coast, asked to manage them. No contract, no plan anyone would recognise as one.

And then, in 1987, they left. All of it, for America.

By the nineties the band owned the genre, and it was John out front: the accent, the dance moves, the voice on the records that carried Christian rock onto arena stages.

He was, by his own description, ambitious and hungry for significance. Whatever the band chased, it caught. And while it was going up, his life was quietly coming apart.

The internet arrived in the middle of the rise. Chat rooms, instant messaging, a private channel that had never existed on the road before. John has been direct about what he did with it. Conversations turned into emotional affairs. Underneath all of it, the drinking got worse.

It ended in a kitchen in 1997. The band was cutting Step Up to the Microphone at Peter Furler's home studio. That night, the song on the desk was Entertaining Angels. They took a break, and John told Peter everything. Within days he was out.

Then came the divorce, the drugs, and a depression that closed over him. He has since corrected the public version of it: the story that went around was that cocaine got him thrown out of the band. The cocaine came after. After his wife left, and after the band did.

He went back to Australia and sold Lamingtons door to door out of a basket. He got thrown out of a shopping mall by security for it, and heard God laughing at him. “Just yesterday you were being escorted to the biggest stages in America by security guards. Now you're being thrown out of a mall by security guards.” He has one phrase for what he became in those years, and he uses it without flinching.

He would use that word again, on a piece of paper, in the studio, almost thirty years after he first earned it.

He tells the whole of it here, in his own voice, to Jonathan Allen Wright. It is the fullest account of his story he has given publicly, and it's where every quote in this piece that isn't from a newspaper comes from.

He has never asked anyone to soften it. He names it, he takes it, and when he finally wrote the book about it he was careful to say what the book was not.

That is the rule this piece runs on too. This is a story about how an album got made.

Everything that follows traces back to one person, and it's not me.

David Evans is one of the pioneers of Australian contemporary Christian music. His fingerprints are on Youth Alive, Hillsong, Hope Centre Brisbane, Influencers Church and Planetshakers, and more than twenty live and studio albums carry his name. In Brisbane he ran a worship team called cre8ive. He's also the reason I'm in this story at all.

He and John made a record together, Breathe Again. By 2006 they were planting a church on the Sunshine Coast, the same coast the Newsboys had started on.

John and Tanya's ministry today is iReachUSA. Before that it was Cre8iveREACH. The same word John was building things under in Brisbane twenty years ago is still on the door.

If you want to know who Dave was before any of this, it's on tape. Youth Alive rallies, thousands of kids, and him out front.

Will Your Soul Survive?David Evans at a Youth Alive rally, South Australia, 1994.

I Can FeelHis song, from the Youth Alive years.

Shout to the LordHillsong, the nineties. That is Dave at the microphone, and the shirt alone is worth the click.

Dave is also the only reason I know John at all. He introduced us more than a decade ago. We had dinner a couple of times, and then I didn't see John for ten years.

And here's the part I didn't see until I went looking for it while writing this. Dave is in Florida now, with Source Church in Ellenton. The other record I was making in that same stretch, the one that had me running two albums at once, was Source Worship's first live album. Same church. Same man in the middle of both.

Here is how thin the thread was. My family and I had just moved to Florida, for the arrival of our first grandbaby. Dave didn't know that. He still thought I was in Colorado, and he hired me to fly in and wire up the Pro Tools rig at Source Worship's studio at Source Church in Ellenton, Florida. One room, two booths, a template that needed building.

Toward the end of that day, John James walked in. Dave started laying out the plan for him: they would fly me in from Colorado for the vocal sessions. I had to interrupt. We live here now. Ninety minutes up the road.

Dave stopped, did the math, and turned to John. You're going to hire David. He's going to take your project to another level. And that was that. A handshake, ten years of nothing, and then John was standing in front of a microphone in the room I had just wired. I was hired to engineer his vocal sessions. That was the entire job.

It became vocal production, because he hadn't sung seriously in years and was nervous about it, and somebody had to decide what to keep and what to try again tomorrow. Then it became writing, because lyrics and phrases weren't landing and we changed them. Then chords started moving too. Then Dave and I were producing the record.

What John and Dave had brought me were rough demos built on Apple loops, in the wrong keys, in the wrong time signatures. Our job was to turn that into music. I ended up playing or programming guitars, bass, keys and synths across the album, editing the drums, and mixing and mastering the whole thing.

Nobody handed me the mixing chair. When the record was ready to mix there was a big mix-off. I had recorded and produced and touched so much of this album that I wanted it, and at the same time I wasn't sure I was the right one for it, until I dug in and remembered: this is a different hat, and it's the one I've worn for more than twenty years. So I had fun with it. My mix won, and the masters came with it.

The last time he made an album, it ran through an analog console. This one lived inside a computer.

And he knew exactly what he didn't want it to sound like. A few months before the record came out he was asked what he made of Christian music now, and he was polite about it for about one sentence.

That is the brief. It was never written down and nobody said it out loud in the room, but it's what we were doing. Everything below this line is a record built to sit outside that lane.

The shirt

I didn't stage the photograph above and I didn't notice what it meant until I went back through the footage to write this. Look at what he has on.

Not Ashamed. Romans 1:16. iReachUSA.

Not Ashamed is the Newsboys record from 1992. It is his. He sang it, back when the whole thing was still ahead of him and none of it had come apart yet. Romans 1:16 is the verse the title comes from: I am not ashamed of the gospel. iReachUSA is the ministry he and Tanya run now, on the other side of everything.

So the man is standing in a vocal booth for the first time in almost thirty years, singing a song about his own scars, wearing the title of the album he made before he fell, printed above the name of the thing he built after. Nobody art-directed that. He just got dressed that morning.

That is the man I watched all summer. A man on a mission. Everyone around him was focused on their job, the task in front of them. John carried a vision and a purpose, and it never switched off.

John and Tanya run iReachUSA now. Prisons, recovery centres, schools, military bases.

That is where these songs go. He called the record God of the Second Chance because that's a description of his life, not a figure of speech.

And ask him where the second chance came from and he won't credit the industry, or time, or luck. He points at Jesus. He has been pointing at Jesus since a rattling van in 1979, and losing everything did not change the direction of his finger.

The hands on this record.

The story that matters here is John's, and he tells it the same way every time, pointing past himself to Jesus. This page is his story first. But a record is also made by hands, in rooms, over long nights, and that part rarely gets written down anywhere. So here it is, with gratitude:

On the drums

Darran Muller cut his drums at his own studio in Australia, with Dave and me producing him down the wire, and he behaved the way every producer wishes every drummer would. Every time we asked for something he did it. Takes, retakes, open hat, closed hat, a different feel on the second verse. He followed direction exactly and he played it right the first time, over and over.

Thirty-seven years after the band flew that ocean, the drums for this record crossed it the other way, as files.

I edited his drums across the record and I want to be honest about what that involved: almost nothing. They didn't need it. That's the highest compliment a drum editor can pay a drummer.

What that season gave my family can't be put on paper. Consider this the thank-you note.

One more credit, for the record. Everything on this album that isn't the songwriting ran through my hands at some point. So if something on it bothers you, it's mine. The songwriting is safe.

That is the record as it was made. Here is how to get inside it yourself.

Real multitracks, off the actual record.

Not a sample pack, and not a session built to be easy. These are the actual tracks from Blessed, the song that opens this page's running order: drums, bass, guitars, keys, voices, click. One song, given away whole. Pull it into your DAW and go.

Then send it back. There is a drop box below the download, and the mixes that come in get posted here with the mixer's name on them. You will be able to hear what a room full of other engineers did with the same twenty-odd tracks, which is the most useful thing in mixing and the hardest thing to get hold of.

The other ten songs live in the Control Room, where members get the whole album's multitracks and vote which songs get the full mix breakdown treatment on the streams.

Free, and shared with John's blessing. If you post your mix, tag John James first, then The Mix Academy. If you're feeling generous, tag iReachUSA too, which is his and Tanya's ministry and the reason any of this exists.

John isn't the only one who walked away from music. If you fronted a band in another decade, if there are songs sitting in a drawer or a hard drive or a shoebox of cassettes, read this part slowly: this record started where yours is sitting right now. Apple loops, wrong keys, wrong time signatures. That is what came in the door. You just listened to what went out.

Taking a record from that to done is what I do. Production, players, editing, mixing, mastering, the whole distance. If this page made something itch, tell me about your songs. Worst case, you get an honest answer about what they need. And if you're an engineer and it was the waveforms that got you, The Mix Academy is where I teach exactly how records like this get mixed.

This page exists because a man with nothing left to prove sent somebody his rough demos anyway. If yours are sitting in a drawer, do what John did. Send them.