Discover Worship: This is the second of a two-part interview with writer/arranger/orchestrator Robert Sterling. Click here to enjoy part one where Robert chronicles his musical journey from jingle writer to CCM writer/producer. We pick up the interview as he shares about the privilege of working with some of his musical heroes and then proceeds to tell us about his latest choral music ventures.
Discover Worship: So, a bit of trivia: you worked with Mel Tormé? Tell us about that.
Robert: That was back when I was doing jingles in Dallas. I had a particular advertising agency client who wanted to get somebody big for their commercials for Tuesday Morning stores. He said, “I want to get Mel Tormé to sing our jingle.” Subsequently, he got also '70's pop singer BJ Thomas and country legend Janie Fricke. So I got to work with all of them, and then later I got to work with my idol, Bill Champlin (of the band Chicago), who sang one for us, too.
So yeah, he said, “We're going to get Mel Tormé,” and I said, “Yeah, good luck with that one,” because Mel Tormé was on the air at the time with the “Charlie” fragrance commercial. But my client could not be stopped, When he wanted something, he got it. He booked Mel Tormé. We cut the track as a big band in Dallas and hopped on a plane and flew out to LA and met Mel Tormé and his agent at what was then United Western Recording, which is a really famous studio out in LA. Mel was the supreme pro – super nice guy. I still remember…I don't think I was even 30. He said, “Well, how do you want me to sing this?” And the wisdom of God came down and just said, “Shut up, Robert, don't say anything!” Basically I said to him, “I want you to be Mel Tormé! I would never suppose I could tell YOU what to sing.” And he was a wonderful gentleman, and he just knocked it out of the park...and I mean in 15 minutes. It just it was nothing to him because he's a real musician. He can read music, and putting notes on the page didn't scare him. He was terrific, and we just kind of chatted, and the worst part of the whole thing is this – did I think to bring a camera? No! You would have had to have a real camera with real film, and my agency guy and me – neither one of us thought to do that. I have no evidence of it other than the recordings. I learned my lesson after that. I've got pictures of BJ Thomas and Bill and those people.
Discover Worship: What a great story! As the years have gone on, obviously, the music business has changed dramatically. The choral music companies have changed, and so recently you've launched your own online distribution of your choral product. Tell us about that.
Robert: I've had a website for more than a decade that was originally established just to stay in touch with people who followed my work and to have an archive listing so that music ministers who were hunting for some music from my past that could get help finding it. I wrote a blog there and still do. It's robertsterlingmusic.com. I wasn't doing any commerce there. It was just information. But a few years ago, I began to sell orchestral arrangements that I had done, mostly hymn arrangements for symphonic orchestra. Those were easy downloads, but I didn't think the world was ready to buy choral music as downloads.
Discover Worship: I know that feeling. It's been an uphill climb for Discover Worship. But gradually, the marketplace has embraced it. Everyone's shopping on Amazon.com now. Clicking and buying is so much easier – Kindle books, Netflix – people now understand the immediacy of the downloadable environment.
Robert: You're absolutely right. Had it not been for guys like you and praisecharts.com and other companies who “plowed that ground,” I don't think I could have done this. I finally realized that as I'm getting older and crankier – and I'm a natural-born curmudgeon – I was saying no to a whole lot more opportunities from the publishing companies than I was saying yes to because I didn't like a lot of the music that was being offered for me to arrange. So if you see my name on something in the last 10 years, it's because I consciously said, “I like this song well enough to work on it.”
Discover Worship: That's important because you're protecting your brand.
Robert: Well, yeah, I had to explain that to some people at one point – you know, why I was being difficult – and it's not that I enjoy being difficult, it just comes easily to me.
I had begun writing new arrangements, and I had a stockpile. I'm not faulting the mainstream publishers, don't misunderstand, because I still work with some of them. In fact, I'm working this week on a chart for Hal Leonard/Shawnee Press. I've got great friends there. I began my publishing career with Shawnee Press back in 1978 or '79. They have their way of doing business, which they're doing it the way they have to, and they put enormous amounts of music out two or three times a year. You try to fill one or two slots of their catalog, and a writer can't make a living doing that. I'm not a super prolific writer, but I couldn't find homes for a lot of the things I was writing because there are so few available slots.
And so I thought I'll create my own availability at a time when the customer base was starting to say, “Okay, we're willing to download.” As a matter of fact, I even did a quick survey with about 200 music ministers who were Facebook friends of mine. I asked, “Would you be willing to download a choral anthem and print your own copies?” About 80 percent responded positively. Some of them were enthusiastic. They said, “We like being able to buy something immediately and have it on our desktop in an instant. We don't have to wait for it to be delivered.” I think that may be some of the younger guys. There's another group who said, “Yes, we understand. It's the way of the world now, and we will do it. We would prefer to buy hard copies when we can but that's not always possible.” There's always some reluctance to accept a new reality. And then there was a handful of guys who said, "No we still want to buy hard copies."
This was a very new venture for me, and so I opted to go with the 80% – to aim for them – and maybe I will offer hard copies in the future. It's a very expensive proposition. The whole process is very expensive. I mean, making the demos – as you well know, that's the single most expensive part of the process – and a lot of customers don't understand just how expensive that is. So it was it's a very new venture I began in the spring of this year.
Discover Worship: How many pieces do you currently have?
Robert: I just released numbers 12 and 13, I think; so I have 13 anthems.
Discover Worship: Some of them are hymns and some of them are original compositions of yours, right?
Robert: Yeah, there's a group of hymn arrangements. There's a group of original compositions, and I have three different product lines that I'm going to try to develop. The main one is the traditional choral thing, which I call the Sanctuary Series. But because I also have always written, for lack of a better term, pop-oriented, contemporary music as well, I have a Gospel Series.
As a matter of fact, I'm about to record a song I wrote with Regi Stone called “Love Alone.” Most of the things that are in your catalog that I've contributed to have been co-writes with Regi because he came to me with a tune, and I wrote a lyric, or I went to him with a lyric, and he wrote a tune. It’s been back and forth like that over the years. Then Luke Garrett cut a couple of our songs right before he passed away, and I've got that material available online. So I've got the traditional, the gospel, and then I write a little bit for high school and college choir. I call that the Concert Series. I've got two pieces in that right now. That'll be the hardest to develop...I mean it really is. I'm doing those pieces just because I want to. I don’t know that I'll ever make money on them until and unless somebody discovers them.
Discover Worship: Well, building a catalog certainly is a way to get discovered because you have to have kind of critical mass.
Robert: Right, and I haven't reached that yet. You could probably educate me totally on how long it will take just to get people to take you seriously to think “Oh, he's for real. He's not going away – there's enough material here.” Like you said, you need a critical mass that makes it worth their time to go and even visit the website.
Discover Worship: I think what you're doing with periodic blogs and emails and debuting the music – it'll take time, but people who love and respect your approach, both songwriting and arranging, will love going to robertsterlingmusic.com. And in addition to that, you also offer songwriting on commission. So if somebody wants to commission you for a special event they can. I also found it interesting that you're working on musical theater projects. Share a little bit about that.
Robert: I’ve always liked musical theater, even when I didn’t know I liked it. My mother dragged me to a couple of movie musicals when I was a kid, and I thought, “I'm gonna hate these.” The Music Man and The Sound of Music – they are two of the great American musicals. But I ended up thinking, “These are really fun” and I never realized how much I liked them because as a teenager I got into rock n roll and jazz and whatever. Churches in the 1980s began doing these really large dramatic presentations, and I was a member of a church that did that in Texas. I was asked to write a song or two for them, and I began to realize, just watching it – trying to discover what works and what doesn't work – noticing the power of theatre and music. This live moment where a character, somebody the audience has grown to like, breaks into song and sings something important – you're going, “This is powerful…really powerful.”
So, I had an idea right after I got signed at Word. I wanted to write an Easter musical but I didn't want it to be the cantata type where there's a little bit of narration, a little bit of acting, and a little bit of singing. You know, you'd go along and then stop everything for a song. I wanted all the songs to carry the story. I just knew that's what felt right. And so I wrote a musical called The Choice. It's flawed, but at least it had an original storyline; it even had a romance in it. My whole thinking was that the audience has to know and like these people if they're going to care about what they sing. I wanted them to like my characters, and that was my first attempt at it.
The ones on my website are much further developed than that. I was hired a few years ago to write an wholly original two-hour work for an Assemblies of God Church in Novi, Michigan, (which is a suburb of Detroit). They wanted Broadway. And so I said, “All right then.” and wrote a musical called God Bless Us Every One. It was based on an idea that I cooked up with co-writer Deborah Craig-Claar. It was basically Tiny Tim from the Dicken’s Christmas Carol as an adult and what happened to him. That’s Deborah's idea. She gets full credit for that.
The other full musical I've got on my site started out as a youth musical for Word called For Unto Y’all. Having grown up in Texas, I thought, “What if the Christmas story happened in the Old West?” And so I took the basic Luke 2 story and set it in the Old West. The shepherds are cowboys. Gabriel is this combination of the Lone Ranger and Johnny Cash. All the songs are our salute to various sorts of Country and/or Western songs. So there's Western swing (there's no “bro” country because that was not invented back then) and other traditional kinds of Country. There’s a Willie Nelson "Crazy" kind of song. People loved doing the musical because they liked dressing up like cowboys.
Discover Worship: In Texas, they love it. Well, actually that's how they dress, right?
Robert: Exactly. I used to get emails and letters from people going, “Our adults want to do it, not the youth. The adults want to do it.” So, it was being done as dinner theater. So I expanded the show and wrote more songs. And so that it became more of a real musical theater offering, a two-act offering if you want to do it that way. Now that's a licensed program, too. But I just love musical theater. It's got a real power to reach people that regular songwriting doesn't necessarily have.
Discover Worship: It’s an embodiment – you can touch and see and feel the characters.
Robert: Exactly, and you can lead people to your point of view without hitting them over the head. There's no preaching in musical theater. It's not good to preach in musical theater.
Discover Worship: "No crying in baseball," no preaching in musical theater.,,
Robert: Well, you shouldn't. I mean I think churches are guilty of thinking “we've got to preach in our musical theater presentations.” My theory is that you should use musical theatre as the outside rim of a very large funnel, and you need to use it to get people interested to come in so that you can bring them into conversations. Then you draw them to specific theological truths through preaching. That's what preaching is really great at. Music is not the best way to do that. Music needs to ask the questions and preaching can answer them. And so I love musical theater. But it's very expensive, and it's very time-consuming to write. I worked on Bless Us Every One, that the Tiny Tim sequel, almost non-stop for two years. I did little jobs in the meantime, but from the time I started to the time it got premiered (and afterwards completely rewrote it) was two years. And now I'm rewriting it again with a Hollywood guy who's interested in trying to do a film version of it. So we'll see. That's a super longshot.
Discover Worship: Well, for those of you who've been wondering what Robert Sterling's been up to, here you go: new website, new orchestrations, new arrangements – if you need him to write a special song for a special occasion, he accepts commissions –musical theatre. And he also has a couple of books available, including this one, The Craft of Christian Songwriting, that does a delightful job of equipping and inspiring people to use their musical and lyrical talents for the Lord. So I recommend this to you if that's your interest.
Robert, in closing, please share some encouragement with our choir directors – our worship leaders – who are out there working diligently for the kingdom using music…just some words of encouragement to them.
Robert: I'm not telling them anything they don't know when I say that these are difficult times for music ministry in church. Musical tastes have changed so much, and there's so much pressure to be hip and trendy. So I would encourage them to make sure that whatever music they're doing, that they're really examining the words that they're singing. I also think that we're re-entering a time where patrons of good music are going to be very important to the church and to people like myself who write music for the church.
If we want good music to continue to be written for the church, quality music, then somebody's going to have to pay for it without necessarily recouping their investment. They need to be amateurs in that regard; they need to do it because they love it. That's what amateur means. But it's a difficult time because music ministry is being torn in so many different ways, and music ministers are being expected to deliver a really cool hip worship service and then a traditional worship service and then whatever else, and it's very difficult.
All that to say, I always want to thank these people because, without them, I don't have a voice. I'm not much of a singer. I can't go out like some of these folks and do concerts and everything. So without choirs that will sing my music, I would have no voice. I know it's a lot of work, but I think the evidence is there that a choir is worth the effort, that it creates community. It strengthens the church to have a good choir. You find some of your strongest church supporters sitting in the choir. I've been in choirs, and it's a good healthy thing for everybody involved. So, it's worth the effort. I thank all the music ministers that have sung my music, continue to sing it, and thank their choir members. When I communicate with choir members, I beg them to tell their choir thank you from me because I need those people, the church needs those people. I think it's a very important part of a church's ministry.
Discover Worship: Absolutely! Well, we want to thank you, Robert and encourage our friends to go to robertsterlingmusic.com. Check out the new music from Robert and check out what we have here at Discover Worship. And for you worship leaders and worship pastors and choir directors, thank you.
--We invite you to preview these fine arrangements from Robert Sterling available from Discover Worship:
--Robert Sterling is a Grammy-nominated songwriter, arranger, clinician, and record producer. In addition to garnering six Gospel Music Association Dove Awards and eight Top 10 Christian radio hits, Robert has produced albums by Point of Grace and the Talleys. He has written/arranged/orchestrated a small mountain of choral music anthems, collections, and musicals for Word Music, Belwin Mills, Shawnee Press, and LifeWay Music (among others). A 1977 cum laude graduate of Baylor University's School of Music, Robert and his wife have recently relocated to Waco, TX. His practical treatise, The Craft of Christian Songwriting, is available at Amazon.com. Check out robertsterlingmusic.comfor helpful blogs, new choral arrangements, and information about how Robert can compose a special piece for your congregation. Discover Worship also offers several Robert Sterling arrangements including SATB Medium and Easy difficulty arrangements, as well as a two acoustic worship arrangements.