It is the dead of winter, but the house on Clouet Street in New Orleans is coming to life. The house belongs to legendary producer, Malcolm Burn (Midnight Oil, Emmylou Harris, John Mellencamp, Iggy Pop, among others), the band he is producing in his living room/recording studio is The Normals, and the album they are recording is Coming To Life.

      Burn has one bit of advice for the band, one criteria, and one standard..."Do something brilliant!" And so the recording sessions go. No scratch tracks. No separate control room. Everything and everybody is in the living room. Play live. Play together. Feed off of each other. Play it again. And again. Stretch. Push. Burst your little bubbles of creativity. Think outside the box. Create the moment. Find that intangible feeling. Do something brilliant!

      Sometimes the brilliant comes when least expected. Bassist B.J. Aberle comes in late on a downbeat, sparking a new verse and a new direction for the song. It's magic. Cason Cooley combines a big, airy rock 'n' roll vibe with his earthy, honky tonk piano licks. It's distinctive. Guitarist Mark Lockett finds an intensity to his playing that has nothing to do with speed or volume. Mike Taquino adds a taste of percussion magic. It's powerful.

      Andrew Osenga is desperately trying to wrench the last vestiges of emotion from his ragged vocal cords before they give out completely. Malcolm wants more. Andrew sings again. More. Again. Make it sound like it hurts. It does hurt.

"It's all that I can do to keep smiling, Could you kiss me if I was crying, was dying, was feeling fine?"

      Malcolm smiles. That's it. It's brilliant. "We play shows every night," B.J. muses. "Most nights are good; some nights are great. And then there are those nights that are just magic. Malcolm was able to capture the magic."

      Drawing acclaimed response from listeners and key industry contacts, feedback from Scotty Smith, Senior Pastor at Christ Community Church in Franklin, Tennessee, perhaps sums it up best: "This project drew me in immediately because of its rare combination of intelligent lyric, tasteful artistry and passion. I am not sure when I have listened to a recorded project that more faithfully and creatively presents a tapestry of Biblical worldview. Through these songs I get a better understanding of what it means to know God as creator and redeemer. What more could one hope for?"

      Following their ForeFront debut in 1998, the road from Nashville to New Orleans took the band nearly two years. Their first release, Better Than This, is noted for the song "Everything (Apron Full of Stains)" which stayed at #1 on the charts for several weeks. Then came two years of touring. Two years of learning the business side of the industry. Two years of sorting out relationships - one member lost, three members gained. Two years for a collection of long-time friends to ponder what they had to say, and how they wanted to say it.

      "Our first record hadn't really impressed us," Andrew confesses. "It was a nice record, but we knew it wasn't great. We had a desire to do something better, but we didn't know how. We wanted to do something unique, but we didn't know why. As we studied the theology behind being unique, we realized that God created us individually, and He called us 'Good'. Part of God's majesty is revealed in the fact that we are so different. If the five of us were going into the studio to make a record, and if we wanted to honor God by our creativity, then it should sound like nothing else that has ever been done."

      For Andrew, the band's primary song tailor, inspiration was as close as his library...and his life. The works of C.S. Lewis, Brother Laurence, and Brennan Manning supplied the impetus for several songs, while his own life experience provided fodder for the rest. Broken relationships and broken hearts, loneliness and lust, grace and trust...life as it is...life as it should be. Atypical themes not often explored in modern Christian music, but handled with raw-edged honesty on Coming To Life.

      "I think Christian music tends to be unrealistic at times," he explains. "Almost every story in the Bible is about God making good on a failure. We all like to talk about the 'making good', but we don't often look at the fact that we are always going to start at the point of failure. I want to write those kinds of lyrics, honestly and creatively. I hope that God will use them to touch somebody's life. But if He doesn't - if none of these songs ever gets used, it is enough to know that I did a good job writing them. God can be just as pleased by that."

      The deep themes woven throughout the album are marked through lyrics in "We Are The Beggars at the Foot of God's Door," a moving piece about grace and how we prove daily why God shouldn't have anything to do with us, yet He continues to with joy, love and passion. Move on to "Black Dress," a song that Andrew wrote in an attempt to get into the mind of King David in between the time he saw Bathsheba bathing and when she enters his room: "will she walk slowly/or will she come at all/I can't believe I made the call/will she wear that black dress?/as holy as the night/as holy as I want to feel/(I want to feel alright)/maybe I'll be good/I could be gone when she gets here/I've still got a chance to make this one alright..."

      The recording process is over now. Coming To Life is as finished as The Normals can make it. The end result is perhaps best described as a stirring chronicle of everyday struggles and the healing we find in God's goodness. Ultimately, it's up to the individual listener to sample the sounds and taste the lyrics. Bittersweet? Perhaps. Unique? Definitely. But then, so is life.

      "I think the definition of recording is to capture life on tape - to capture the story on tape," Mark Lockett muses. "Coming To Life gets right down to that. It is so real that it feels like you are in that room at that time. Are there flaws in it? Perhaps, but like life, things are by no means perfect. It is in the flaws that we found a greater good."

      It is the story of us who ignore and embrace Him. It is the story of the people of God. The story of what we believe. The Normals.