Heart Full of Sound

by TribeHouse

We asked Ari Neufeld to tell us a bit about the latest video & song he wrote called “Heart Full of Sound“. Here’s what he gave us (along with the video included at the bottom).

Heart Full of Sound is a special song to me, because it came out of true willingness to receive something from the Creator. There is a purity in that willingness that so rarely is able to be a conduit to a song that comes on the wind like a ribbon of dancing texture. I tethered myself to that wind for a morning, while looking out my window at the mountain and a family of deer, lazily grazing on a deerpath near my house. It was in that quiet worship I felt the deep echo of all the colors and textures around me creating music inside of me. Hollow music, with deep, lush valleys. Positive, uplifting edges like a bastion of trees along an old hilltop trail.

Heart Full of Sound is a prayer. A prayer to receive the triumphs of an arduous journey. A prayer to celebrate the lonely, fulfilling solitude of a distant, still water. A prayer of peace as sure and tangible as the golden rays of the sun on a cold, winter’s morning. The “breath” of God.

I recorded every note of this project on GarageBand, using all kinds of “unorthodox” studio methods with my new computer. I wanted to push myself to create something beautiful and slightly different without using using just my typical guitar. I used a high strung Nashville and a ukelele for the bulk of the song, and then filled it out with an extremely old piano resting in the chicken coop, a toy electric guitar, a harmonica and finally a detuned banjo for all of the percussion. I wanted it to sound hollow and yet really warm. Clean and inviting, like a cold mountain stream.

My Aussie buddy Nathan Andrews and I took all of this emotion and intention up the mountain with us one Saturday morning in October, as the sun was rising, and did our best to captivate, through images and expressions the essence of Heart Full of Sound’s expectation. To diversify this effect, we filmed a segment in front of a green screen, in which I wore professional clothes, like I would for a jazz serenade, and superimposed images of the city, under moonlight, below the hill. Then, through a couple angle tricks, we expounded the phrasing “My heart is full of sound a mile above the ground” by actually causing my character to lift up off of the ground and into the air in a final pure burst of elation.

The depth of this kind of peace — to feel completely loved and valuable in the midst of so much perfect creation — is what we hoped to capture in this simple, yet effective movement. I wanted some of the most profound moments in the song to be about the simplest things around me: moss, bark, grass, bull-rushes, pine cones, steamy breath, sunlight. And then the deer showed up. This final movement really filled out the true expression of the song for me, and made me feel connected, in even a deeper sense, to the “beyond” that is functioning in it’s own profound way right outside my window…. the true magic of life.

This prayer is a sincerely honest plea to know — even more — what the view looks like when the mountain is climbed.