The Story of a Song
October 2009
Making the Path Straight
One day recently, the HIM Board Chairman, Bill Austin, introduced Hank to a man named Frank Fortunato, a man who works with Operation Mobilization and is the head of Heart Sounds International. The two had met years earlier at GCoMM. After hearing again about the vision for Seeds Unlimited, Frank was given a quick tour of the professional recording studio, listened to Matthew Otrembra’s translated recordings, and was taken aback. He was even more surprised to hear how much groundwork had been laid out; even the legalities of international copyrights had been thought through and prepared.“The contracts are another whole story,” Hank adds. “I’ve got a bunch of really good contracts that circumvent the 'music industry' altogether. Obviously one of the central goals is to support the songwriters so they can make a living writing their songs. I had a lawyer donate about $25,000 worth of contracts. They’re all done, they’re ready to go.”
The legal framework of contracts and costs are designed to support the original songwriter while allowing them to retain full ownership of their work, support the translator and singer of translated songs, the music ministry itself, as well as benefit international missions in general. The vision is not only to have Mission Recording’s studio in North Carolina, but multiple studios around the world involved in producing the product as a network called Mission Recording.
“Frank Fortunato got in touch with me about a week after he left and said something like, ‘Hank I didn’t tell you this while I was there, but Operation Mobilization and Heart Sounds International have been praying for two years about a Recording Network of studios. We’ve been calling it Mission Recording. And I never imagined that translation of songs into English could be sung like what I heard there.’”
Mission Recording and Seeds Unlimited had made yet another valuable friend.
“Every single step of the way, everything that has been done, every miracle you see, is all relationship-based. Obviously, the first is the relationship to the Father. It seems so hard that you could even take the art of one culture and move it to another culture, and maintain the art. It’s almost like writing a new song; you have to take some liberties, but so what? I mean, that’s beautiful. It’s just another piece of art that’s based on the same Truth of the same Father.”
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Making the Path Straight