One of Our Last Weekends Stateside

After a couple days of travel (one quite strenuous and one a bit easier), we've arrived in Florida waiting to receive notice that our Visa applications have been processed. Once processed, we'll be spending a couple days in Atlanta to go through an interview with the Korean Consulate and hopefully leave Atlanta with our approved Visas in hand.

It was a long process drawn out over a short period of time and I'm really happy to see things starting to come together. We will hopefully be in South Korea mid-February and adjusting to our (for a time) new homeland.

Before that can happen, we have a little project that has been keeping us quite busy in the meantime.

Serenity and I have been writing music since 2004. I have been in all kinds of projects with varying degrees of success since high school, but never has one meant more to me than what we're doing right now: the Bell & the Hammer. It's become a crucial outlet for us to use the talents God has given us, and never have we taken it more seriously than in 2009. We played more shows than all the other years combined. We played in Florida, Kentucky, Indiana and all across Ohio. We spent a lot of time developing some great relationships with some equally great artists in Cincinnati. We have also finished something in this past year that we have ultimately failed to in previous years.

An album.

We have recorded so much in the past it's hard to keep track of. A few songs with a friend. Demoing all the songs in our apartment. We've never been able to capture our songs accurately until this project. Our debut album "To Set Things Right" is 12 songs, 51 minutes long, and the first recording we're really, truly proud of. We're so thankful that we were actually able to finish it, well, hopefully.

We just received the final masters yesterday, and we're in a race against time to get the album to out to those who've ordered it before we're in South Korea! I'm uploading the songs to get pressed as we speak, and it's our main concern during our Florida staycation.The album is going to have two sleeves, similar to a vinyl record. Serenity is (hopefully) putting them together herself in the next few days. It'll be an interesting adventure no matter what. To those that have ordered, don't worry, you'll definitely receive your album.

Just know it was hurriedly handcrafted by us a few days before it shows up.

~Dan