Andre first brought the idea for Moments to me several years ago. At the time, most of the songs were still voice memos, piano demos, and ideas he had been carrying for a while.
Andre is a vocalist and pianist, so the heart of the music was already there. He knew what he wanted to say. My job was to listen past the rough recordings and figure out what each song could become.
Some of the ideas came together quickly. Others took a little longer.
Holy was one of the songs I had to sit with.
Finding the Sound of Holy
The original demo was Andre singing over a basic piano track. I tried a few different ideas, but nothing really settled until I found the synth sound that became the main thread running through the song.
Once I heard that, the rest of the arrangement started opening up.
I recorded organ using my Hammond XK-3C and began layering the textures around Andre’s piano and vocal direction. A remote guitarist recorded several of the main guitar parts from his studio and sent the files back to me. The drums and bass were also recorded live, which gave the song the movement and weight it needed.
One of my favorite parts is the breakdown built around the traditional Holy, Holy, Holy hymn.
I did not want it to feel like we stopped Andre’s song just to insert a familiar church moment. It needed to belong there. So I built the strings and background vocals in a way that allowed the hymn to rise naturally out of the arrangement and then lead us back into the song.
The string work became a major part of Holy. I used EastWest Hollywood Strings to build the orchestration, working through separate violin, viola, cello, and bass parts instead of treating the strings like one large pad.
That takes longer, but it gives you more control over how the arrangement moves. Some sections needed the strings to sit quietly underneath the vocals. Other moments needed them to rise and help carry the emotion forward.
There was quite a bit of editing involved too. Live recordings always have small timing differences, breaths, noises, and moments that need attention. I cleaned and aligned the performances, but I did not want to edit the life out of them. The goal was still for it to sound like musicians playing together, not everything snapped into place by a computer.
From Demos to a Live Album
As the other songs developed, Moments became much bigger than a collection of studio recordings. Andre wanted to present the music live.
That changed the way we had to think about the production.
The arrangements needed to work as records, but they also had to hold together onstage with a band, vocalists, playback, and live transitions. We prepared stems and supporting tracks while still leaving enough space for the musicians and singers to make the performance feel alive.
Andre also brought in several featured vocalists across the project. Each one added something different without taking away from the sound he had been developing.
The background vocals were a major part of the album. We spent time shaping the harmonies, stacking parts, and deciding when the singers needed to be full and when they needed to pull back. Sometimes the best vocal decision was adding another layer. Other times it was removing one so the lead could speak clearly.
That balance carried through the entire project.
Songs like Nothing Else, His Poema, Amazing Love, and Freedom each needed their own sound, but the album still had to feel like one complete body of work. That meant paying attention to the instrumentation, vocal textures, transitions, and overall emotional movement from one song to the next.
This is still one of my favorite projects.
Not because everything came together easily. It did not. There were songs we had to revisit, arrangements that changed, parts that had to be recorded again, and ideas that only made sense after we lived with them for a while.
That is part of what made it special.
The album grew out of years of songs, conversations, demos, rehearsals, studio sessions, and small decisions that slowly became something much larger than where we started.
When I listen back now, I hear the production, but I also remember the process behind it. The moments when something finally clicked. The musicians sending in parts that changed the direction of a song. The vocal arrangements beginning to lift. The first time the entire project started feeling like an album.
That history is all over the music.