Derek Webb's new CD, The Ringing Bell, takes on the concept of peace. Derek talks to us about the title and the concept.
Derek Webb has written some great music, first with Caedmon's Call and then on his own. I had the pleasure of chatting with Derek about his latest album, songwriting and old friends.
In this first part of the interview, Derek talks about title of his new album and the concept of the album.
Suite: The title of your new CD, The Ringing Bell, is from lyrics in the song “The End”, but is there some meaning beyond that context?
Derek: The, title really, for me, goes a handful of different directions. It’s interesting, but with every one of my records, except this one, I’ve had a really obvious title. Most of my records I’ve known what the title was going to be before I even wrote the first song, it’s really weird. I’ll conceptualize something I’ll have a really strong idea about, a sound or a concept, something I want to go after and the title comes just really naturally, really early.
And with this record we were down to the absolute wire. There was no obvious title anywhere on this record. I didn’t really know what to call it and The Ringing Bell kind of came at me from a few different directions. And for that reason it doesn’t really mean one thing to me. In that context of the lyric it references to Pavlov and the way that people have typical responses with the things they’ve seen before. It doesn’t exactly mean that.
There’s also an urgency for me to the concept of a record like this, mostly about the idea of peace, if you can live peaceably with people. Just the urgency of that idea. And “the ringing bell” just carries the urgency of that idea. There’s a handful of different images that can attain that meaning and for me that made the concept stick.
Suite: When you were putting this together did you have a concept for the album or was it a pool of songs that you pulled from?
Derek: No it definitely was a pretty strong idea from the beginning of what I felt like I wanted to do. I’ve got a lot of my friends that are artists in the way that they write all the time. They’re always writing so that they have a lot of songs to choose from when they make records. And they’ll have some that they don’t record and they’ll record for other things where they always have songs laying around.
I’m not like that at all. I literally write 11, 12 songs a year and I record every one of them. I never have one spare and I have to use every single one and it’s always been that way. Even back in the Caedmon’s days it was like that. When it came time to make the record, I had exactly the songs I needed. Not 1 more not 1 less.
This record was no different. The songs started to come, and they came really late in the game, it was just maybe a couple of months before I was scheduled to start recording the record that the songs really started to show up.
I did have a strong idea I knew that I wanted to write a bit on the peace tradition of the church and otherwise and I was really concerned more on that particular issue because I touched on it on Mockingbird a little bit. It felt like there was more discussion to be had, maybe some further views to get into in terms of that idea and another record's worth of songs just to focus on that. So I did know I was going to go in that direction. I was meditating in that direction.
Derek Webb Interview Part Two: Derek talks about peace and pacifism.
Derek Webb Interview Part Three: Derek expands on pacifism and tells us about his graphic novel.
Derek Webb Interview Part Four: Derek talks about using different mediums to communicate a concept.
Derek Webb Interview Part Five: Derek talks about his courtship and having fun.
Derek Webb Interview Part Six: Derek talks about reuniting with his friends in Caedmon's Call
