(Due to the response to this song from my friends on twitter, I am posting this, and making this song available for download)

If you read my about page, you would know that I am a songwriter, and started a band called Silencing the Stones in 2004.  Although we went on a hiatus late last year (life just got in the way of the music), we managed to write dozens of songs and record demos of several.  We released a self-produced EP in 2005. It’s not horrible, but the production level shows a lack of experience on our part. This song originally appeared in it’s first form on that EP. (If you promise not to make too much fun of it, I’ll send you a link to download the songs from this EP. You’ll have to email me: john@dubdynomite.com).

I wrote this song in 2003, after a friend of mine (a youth pastor at the time) gave his personal testimony about his battle with addiction and coming to know Christ at a youth service on a Saturday night. The following Sunday morning, after leading worship, I sat down during the message and wrote out the lyrics to the song (this was before the band was started). After putting the band together, this became our signature song. (I’ll post a longer story about this song and the adventure it took us on later).

By 2008, our sound as a band had evolved tremendously (due to some membership changes and rearranging), and we wanted to record something that better reflected the new sound. We rearranged “One More Second Chance” and added a bridge. We enlisted Barry Blair (formerly of Audio Adrenaline) to help us produce a recording.  We let Barry pick the song, out of our entire catalog, and this was the song he chose.  The song you can play below is a result of our sessions with Barry. (Our original plan was to record a full album; alas, as of yet that has not occurred).

ONE MORE SECOND CHANCE
Words and Music by John Williams

LYING HELPLESS ON THE FLOOR OF
THE PRISON THAT I MADE
NOTHING ELSE FOR ME TO DO HERE
AND NO ONE ELSE TO BLAME
THE SUN WAS SLOWLY FADING
ON A LIFE I’D HARDLY LIVED
LOOKING LIKE THIS WAS THE END

IT TOOK A MIRACLE TO SAVE ME
WHEN I TURNED TO YOU
TO GIVE ME ONE MORE SECOND CHANCE
YOU’RE THE ONLY ONE WITH POWER
TO MAKE EVERYTHING NEW
AND GIVE ME ONE MORE SECOND CHANCE

TOOK FINALLY HITTING BOTTOM
TO SEE WHAT I’D BECOME
WHEN I FOUND WHAT I WAS CHASING
THERE WAS NOWHERE ELSE TO RUN
LORD IT WAS YOUR MERCY
THAT FINALLY LET ME SEE
EVERYTHING THAT I COULD BE

SO FAR AWAY FROM YOU (SLIPPING AWAY)
SO FAR AWAY FROM YOU (SLIPPING AWAY)
BUT YOU BROUGHT ME BACK TO YOU
WHEN I COULDN’T REACH

Download this track for free by clicking the down arrow on the player above.

Glee is one of my new favorite shows.  Sure, it’s not covering a lot of new ground when it comes to subject matter (high school, relationships, cliques), it does have a sort of irreverent humor that I enjoy.

Oh, and they sing. A lot. I like singing.

So far, some of the songs that have been covered on Glee have been fairly recent and very popular songs. Likely to have been heard on the radio and/or on music videos (they still play those on TV somewhere, right?) in the last few years.

Now, the variety of music available to us today is staggering, what with iTunes, Amazon, Rhapsody, Pandora, last.fm, et al. (not to mention illegally downloading from peer-to-peer networks). Yet, in the mainstream music media (radio mostly), the playlists for the Top 40/Hot 40 stations are very limited and repetitive. Teens and young adults still listen to radio quite a bit, at least where I am from, and as such, are only exposed to that which radio deems worthy of airtime (which, in my opinion, is mostly shallow, formulaic, meaningless pop music with very little substance).

I’m not entirely sure of the demographics for Glee, but based on some limited internet research, it would seem that at least some teens and young adults are watching. And, in the process of watching, unintentionally, their musical horizons are being broadened, because the a good number of the songs that Glee is covering reach beyond the scope of recent pop music and into great older songs, and musicals.

In the pilot episode alone, they would have heard “Where is Love” from the musical Oliver!, “On My Own” from Les Miserables, and “Leaving on a Jet Plane” by John Denver, just to name a few.

Does watching Glee actually expand one’s musical horizons?  I’m not sure. But it could. At the least, it reminded me of a great old song that I will leave you with:

I have done a massive edit to this post, as there are much better sources for the information that I was trying to provide here.  I will mainly focus on my experiences with the ‘heist’, and a general perspective on the process.

There is a lot of information going around and a lot of online activity happening with regard to what is now becoming known as the Stockholm Syndrome ‘heist’.  The purpose of this post is to bring people up to speed with what has happened so far (I’ll try my best).

The heist had its beginning in an email sent out to those subscribed to Derek Webb’s email list on 5/12.  The email was a introduction to some apparent issues that Derek was having with his record label about the upcoming release of his new album “Stockholm Syndrome”.

A second email went out on 5/19, saying that Derek was going offline, and to follow him on a new twitter account: @ssyndrome.  The email was full of underscores in odd places.  Piecing together the letters after the underscores in the message spelled out a secret phrase “paradiseisaparkinglot”, which, as it turns out is a website address.

Both emails were posted at derekwebb.com., (the emails were the only content left on the website, as of the date of the last email).

Going to paradiseisaparkinglot.com, visitors were faced with a strange instruction.  ”Go to Ugly Mugs in Nashville, ask for the Stockholm Latte”.  The page also featured a list of 20 items with download buttons that were disabled, and an rss feed.  The rss feed is a collection of videos, pictures and documents that appear to be clues or bits of information that still have not been fully interpreted yet.

Visitors to Ugly Mug’s in Nashville were given an ‘artifact’, which turned out to be a usb drive that contained a code to be emailed to a provided address.  There were five artifacts deposited in Nashville.  Once all five artifacts were retrieved and the codes emailed out, the first download button was activated at paradiseisaparkinglot.com.  The downloads appear to be bits of an audio file with odd names; the files are referred to as ’stems’.  The prevailing assumption is that all of the stems must be pieced together in order to create a full audio file.

The contents of each one of the drives were a PDF with a validation code, a small audio wav file (one of the stems) and a picture, the contents of which pointed to the location of the next artifact.

Others also found a small hyperlink at the bottom of DerekWebb.com that lead to a form page asking “wha_t do you _wan_t? (erro_r -0558 103)“.  The underscored letters in this spell ‘twtr’.  Checking @derekwebb on twitter for 1/3 at 5:58 gives you the correct answer.  Answering the question correctly takes you to a large picture of Derek with a black eye and a web-address under his eye, black-eye.me.  This leads to yet another submit box with the question “what time it is? (error -0241 120)”.  A twitter post from 1/20 at 2:41 gives you the answer to this question.  Answering correctly gives you a video.  The significance of this video is still in question.

The web was also all a-flutter about what was happening.  A fairly scathing article at Relevant Magazine’s website was posted as the excitement began to build, heavily writing it all off as a publicity stunt.

Then there was silence.  Until the next day, when someone noticed that one of the words in the emails on derekwebb.com had been turned into a hyperlink (r_eal in the second email) and posted it on twitter. The link lead to yet another form submit page, with a form box preceded by the number 1 and enclosed in quotes.  I got into investigative mode and found another hyperlink on the page (trouble in the first email) that lead to the previously mentioned Relevant article.  I figured out that entering the words in quotes from the article in the form box, in order, individually, resulted in a download of a zip file.  The file contained a pre-mix mp3 of “The Spirit vs The Kickdrum” and a text file, containing only the characters 10-2-4.  I blogged more about this here.

The following day, the next set of instructions appeared on paradiseisaparkinglot.com.  These instructions set the hunters to Horizon Records in Greenville SC, where they were to ask for the latest release from Bejerot records.  The requesters received the next artifacts, usb drives with similar contents as before, and codes that unlocked the next set of stems on paradiseisaparkinglot.com.

The next tweet from @ssyndrome came on 5/21: “New instructions coming 05/26. Two cities next week.”  So, apparently the artifact hunters got the Holiday weekend off.

Beginning on Tuesday, May 26, regular instructions were posted that led seekers to cities all over the US, including: Waco, Los Angeles, Decatur(GA), Seattle,  Charlotte(NC), Vienna(VA), Raleigh(NC), Lexington(KY), Dallas, Grand Rapids, St Louis(MO), Birmingham(AL) and Nashville (among others I am sure I left out).

Other significant points of interest in the process:

5/29:  Another word in the emails on derekwebb.com was been hyperlinked.  The word “all” in the first email now points to ssyndrome.info.

Sometime after this, a new link appeared on DerekWebb.com in the first email in the word ‘all’.  @ssyndrome sent out a twitter message that referred to having information for ‘all’ at DerekWebb.com.  Clicking the link took you to ssyndrome.info.  Clicking on the third bar in the barcode picture on the website linked to a movie file.  Some twitter follower found morse code in the video and has translated it – the message states “6 p.m – GPS to follow”.  Further Update:  The 7th stem contains two image files that are named with GPS coordinates:  38.908818, -77.253542

6/11: Three new twitter messages from @ssyndrome:

am i _r_eally trouble_d? are y_ou? _what does that mea_n? te_ll me y_our truth _an_d i’ll tell you mine.

thi_s is s_tupid. who car_es. i’_m leaving. i’m only going to say this _2 times.

You have 12 hours starting now, until Waco time (PM).

The embedded message in the first two twitter posts instructs the seeker to ‘redownload stem2′.  Those who downloaded found a pre-mix mp3 of the new song ‘Freddie, Please’.  The updated stem was only available for 12 hours.

On 6/26, the following instructions were posted: Go to Workplay in Birmingham, AL, go to front desk and ask for two tickets to see the Worboys.  I got the first artifact from this one.  Woohoo!

The first person to get an artifact, got one of a different color than the others (me in this case).  The first one is white, the others are black.

Being the first to retrieve the artifact netted me a Tier 3 pre-order of ‘Stockholm Syndrome (digital and physical) and two free tickets to any show on the ‘Black-Eye’ Tour.

Aftermath:  The seeming culmination of the ‘heist’ was an event in Nashville, where faithful followers gathered for something, but they did not know what it was.  When they arrived, they were greeted by Derek and a representative of his record label, who verified that the controversy surrounding the record was indeed real.  Derek did a short Q & A and the attendees were shown some clips from the documentary video.

During the event, more twitter messages from @ssyndrome were sent, and those who followed the clues received a chance to be shuttled away after the event to an undisclosed location.  The location turned out to be Derek’s house, and the lucky followers were treated to private preview of the album from Derek personally.

On 7/7, ‘Stockholm Syndrome’ became available for pre-order at derekwebb.com.  At this point all of the urls used in the heist were re-routed to the pre-order page.  To my knowledge, no pre-order sales figures have been released, but during the first few days, the pre-order website could barely keep up with the download requests (all pre-orders got an immediate download of some kind).

I downloaded my pre-order several days later (trying to avoid the traffic).  I’ll hopefully be blogging my review at some point.

This has turned into an all out scavenger hunt, apparently with the prizes being new music from Derek Webb’s not-yet-released album, Stockholm Syndrome.

Some places to follow the developments:

We Are The Stories

Bloggable Music Network

ShaneBertou.com

She Must and Shall No Longer Exist

Yesterday, I inadvertently discovered one of the pieces of the puzzle.  Checking my twitter search for ssyndrome, @thievingpoet noted that one of the words (r_eal) on the second of the emails posted on DerekWebb.com had been hyperlinked, and leads to a form page.

I immediately jumped over to investigate.

The form page had a single text box preceeded by the number 1 and surrounded by quotes.  I knew that there had to be a clue somewhere about what to enter in that form box.  I went back to the emails to look for words in quotes.  There were none.  But, I did discover that one of the words (trouble) was hyperlinked in the first email.  This link leads to an article on Relevant Magazine’s website that was somewhat critical of this publicity stunt.

My previous hunch was satisfied when I found that there were in fact several words in quotes in the article (click through to the links to see them).  When  I entered these words in order on the form page, I received the download of a zip file called tsvtkd.zip.  The zip archive contained a premix mp3 of the song “The Spirit vs The Kickdrum” and a rtf file (text) that contained only the characters “10-2-4″.

Of course, as soon as I figured it out, I @ replied @thievingpoet with the news, and posted a comment on the ongoing discussion at We Are the Stories.

I’m happy that I got to make a small contribution to the process, although, I can’t take full credit .  I would have never went on my hunt without the original tweet from @thievingpoet.

On to a different discussion of this whole fiasco:

This “publicity stunt”, “alternate reality game” or “heist” as some people are referring to it, seems to be having two effects on the interested parties.

There are those who are not so enthralled with the whole idea of the “heist”.  Some are frustrated that it is moving slowly and is somewhat complicated.  Some are upset at Derek directly, as they feel that engaging in a publicity stunt undermines his “authenticity” (especially if the “trouble” with the record label turns out to be manufactured to facilitate this process).

Then are those who are taking it at face value and playing along (like myself). This is a very creative way for an artist to reach out to their fans and get them involved (similar things have been done before, so this is nothing new).

To me, this is Derek’s music, and he can do with it whatever he wants, and release and/or promote it however it wants.  I find it ridiculous to hear some of the commentary from those following this who are down on the whole idea with some type of self-righteous music purist attitude.  No one’s making you play along.

If you follow Derek Webb either via email or on Twitter, you’ve probably seen the discussions of late regarding Derek’s new album “Stockholm Syndrome”.

It also doesn’t come as a surprise that, according to Derek’s last two email updates, the record label is taking issue to some of the content of the record, specifically, but not limited to, a particular word in one of the song’s lyrics.  This, of course, is not new for Derek, as he has seen controversy over lyrics before (the song “Wedding Dress” comes to mind).

The latest development has occurred during the last 24 hours, where derekwebb.com has gone mostly dark, left with the text of his last two email updates as the only content.  Derek has also urged his Twitter followers to follow a new account, @ssyndrome, as he has ceased from updated his personal twitter profile for the time being.

The last email update is the most interesting piece of this puzzle so far, as it had some seemingly misplaced underscores strewn throughout the text.  Those with a curiosity, like me, would find a pattern in the placement of the underscores, where taking the letters directly after the underscores and putting them together spells out a possibly cryptic message:

“Paradise is a parking lot”.  Update:  This is a web address, http://paradiseisaparkinglot.com.  The site gives visitors instructions to go on hunts for verification codes.  The first instruction: “Go to Ugly Mugs in East Nashville, ask for a ‘Stockholm Latte’”.  I’m wishing I lived in Nashville right now, because this sounds like a lot of fun.

I will admit, I had not listened to any of the album previews that were previously posted on his website, so I am not sure of the significance of this particular phrase.  I’m hoping the scores of Derek Webb fans on the underbelly of the internet could shed some light on this message.

I’m not sure if all of this furor regarding “Stockholm Syndrome” is absolutely genuine, or is a brilliant marketing scheme, but either way, at this point I’m hooked.

Update:  The first twitter update from @ssyndrome reads “The first of 5 Nashville Artifacts has been found”.  This is getting stranger by the second.

Yet another update:  From the commenter below – a link to a full recap of what has transpired so far, as well as some interesting commentary.  We’ll see how this all plays out.

Other links following this developing story:

The Bloggable Music Network