The Story of a Song
October 2009
The New Vision
Towards the end of the building process of the studio, Hank received a vision for a new work, which would come to be called Seeds Unlimited: a picture of working with both local and national songwriters, translating new songs into other languages, and creating a web-based network for the music to be available to multiple languages and cultures.“One of the first examples that came to mind was a youth leader in Chicago who is ministering to a Polish community and a Thai community,” Hank explains. “He needs music that can reach them in their language and he needs to be able to know the song, that it accurately represents his theology and philosophy, but can also speak to them where they are. How cool would it be if we could have a song, the same song, in English, and Thai, and Hungarian!”
In 2006, the door opened for Hank to attend GCoMM (Global Consultation on Music and Missions) in Minnesota, sponsored by several music mission agencies. Upon arriving, he found that a primary focus at the conference was how to “undo” the mistakes missionaries had made in condemning the music of other cultures; to help nationals gain back their own art by writing worship songs in their own traditional styles.
“Well, you can imagine this guy that comes in and is highly westernized, and I’ve got a vision for taking the fact that music has become extremely western already, even amalgamating it all just a little more by putting the same song to different languages. It was a pretty hard trip, hard for me. When I explained what I was doing and my vision, some of them were really appalled.”
At the conference, Hank got to know a man named Dan McCollam (Sounds of the Nations). After sharing with him about the kind of response he had been receiving to his vision, Dan introduced the idea of starting with international artists, translating songs into English first. “And I just flipped, I’m just like, ‘Wow, how cool is that. I’m even a lot more equipped to work in that direction.’ And after you make that transition into English, that makes it a lot easier to get into multiple other languages, at least where I’m at!”
The first opportunity for Mission Recording to officially work in this direction was with a Polish songwriter named Matthew Otrembra. Visiting the States, Matthew came to the studio with some rough translations of songs that he had written.
“He could speak conversational English, basically. I looked at his translations and was trying to figure out how in the world we were going to make them sing. You can’t translate a song word for word, it just doesn’t work at all. You have to re-create the song. Sometimes you’re going to have to change the whole sentence structure, or the metaphor, to stay true to the song. So when God brought Matthew Otrembra into this thing, it was a total trip, because that was my first experience in actually working with the songwriter to translate songs.”
Finding serious theological holes suggested by the rough and literal translation, Hank and Matthew discussed and wrestled through words. As they talked, they discovered a deep-rooted connection through a theological curriculum that both men had gone through – Hank in the US and Matthew in Poland – and which had influenced Matthew’s original song. A few days later, Matthew had the opportunity to sing his newly-translated song to a group of Americans taking the same course in the States.
“The translations worked beautifully, it’s incredible how good the songs are. We were able to massage the metaphors and make the content sing. And that’s another whole story of God’s amazing interaction with people.”
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The New Vision