ABOUT: OVER OCEANS

In the year 2005 I found myself living in Indianapolis Indiana. Alone, I moved there to pastor and preach to a small fellowship of peers, meeting week by week within a cozy downtown café in the evening. This was a strange turn in my life that I would have never anticipated, and although terrifying and unfamiliar, I knew that committing to this work was the right thing to do. To take on a role of spiritual leadership inevitably means to have one’s own faith tested severely. At this same point in my life, I was also estranged by distance, heartbreak, and time from the woman I would one day marry, Michelle Ramsdale. As the months and years of silence grew strong between us, I entered into a period of lament, forced to drink the cup of tragedy, which is understanding you love someone only after they’re gone. Somewhere, very near the darkest hour in my life, a light shone through. Despite many odds, Michelle and I were reunited, engaged, and married within a few short months. Upon our union we immediately began working full-time on Over Oceans, together. Within the many layers of music, words, and images lies the subtle pattern of my story, and our story, and His story. The album chronicles a journey through loss and through light to the return and wings of flight.

Compared to previous projects, I gave more of my time, thought, resources, and energy to the production of Over Oceans than any of my earlier work. I enlisted the help of many friends in constructing the songs, each adding their particular musical voice, such as my father on trumpet, and other friends on accordian, violin, slide guitar, percussion, and harmony (I also borrowed many instruments and mics!). Once again recording and mixing this album on my own, I experimented with the use of different performance spaces. Often I would haul all my gear into a little ambient chapel and record alone, deep into the night. The folks at Grrr records also helped me to record a few of the tracks that required the use of a full live band. Because of increased regulation in the use of samples (looped excerpts from songs under protection of copyright), I decided to use no samples in the making of Over Oceans, but have every part performed or sequenced. In the end, the album took about 5 months to record, mix, and master, and Over Oceans proved to be the first full-length album released on my own record label: Small Voice. Michelle crafted all the art for the album, and we chose to have it pressed and packaged in a substantial 6-panel heavy cardstock fold-out case in order to complete this work that has felt heavy and substantial within us. I hope you’ll enjoy the final work.

Reviewer: Tamara Turner, CD Baby

”As much as most of us might want to avoid feelings of paralyzing helplessness and vulnerability, there's still something intoxicating and dangerously appealing about drinking from those inebriating vials through music. And for those moments when it's us singing our own melancholic folk song, hanging our head and feeling the weight of the world on the heart, Over Oceans is one of those albums to get us through it, to let us feel "heard," an assuaging balm made from the very ingredients of generic, human heartbreak. With echoes of Ben Harper, Digable Planets and Sufjan Stevens, Josh Garrels captures a thick yet efficiently-constructed, understated style that fluidly encompasses not only lo-fi bred, beautifully-dreary folk but threads of hip hop and electronic phraseology. As you wander the deserted, dusty old roads with night falling over your heart, Josh is the man to turn to and this is the album that will let you "go there," giving you a nudge now and then to keep you from sinking too far.”