I Know What Love Is (Because of You)

Video director, co-producer, mixing engineer

During the 2020 COVID-19 shutdown period, longtime collaborator Jay Parkin of Taylor Guitars reached out to me about collaborating on a charity project to help those in the music industry who were being affected by the complete shutdown of the music industry. Not only were artists not touring, recording studios were closed, touring staff were laid off, and many thousands of people in tangential roles across the industry were suddenly out of work.

Keith Goodwin of Good Old War had shared a song he'd written as a music class project with his children for Keith's mother-in-law who was fighting cancer. They made the song as a love letter to her since they weren't able to visit her. Jay say the potential in making the song a love letter to everyone and asked if I'd be interested in working on the project. As a longtime Good Old War fan, that was an immediate yes. Keith sent over the demo recording and after I took a first pass at mixing it, we immediately began discussing bringing on more artists.

Jay and Keith brought on many industry artists like Jason Mraz, Zac Brown, Justus West, Alana Springsteen and many more while I reached out to friends like Josh Krajcik, who sang the second verse, and Sara Niemietz. Artists were given the demo only and I assembled mixes from what they sent in. Some artists sent one track and some sent twenty. We eventually decided to add a third verse, which was performed by Taylor Guitars' Lindsay Love and Zac Brown. 

Once the mix was finalized, my friend Tobias Doering offered to master it, which all three producers immediately loved. 

Along with audio, we'd asked artists to send in video clips, most of which were shot on iPhones. DP Chris Sorenson filmed some socially distant clips and Mike Gallagher of BiFocal Films was contracted to  locally film Keith Goodwin and his family at home. I was fortunate to work with Ryan Satterfield, a great editor who created video tapestries to show how large our group of contributors was. I contributed an intro for the song and some color and restoration work on phone clips while working with Ryan to make sure the right artists were on screen during their parts.