The Bell And The Hammer: The Things We Get Wrong: Black Vinyl

It has been twelve years since Serenity and I, under the moniker The Bell & the Hammer, have released an album. Our first, To Set Things Right, was released in 2010 just a month or so before we dropped our packed-up lives into the belly of a plane and headed west to the far east to make a life for one year in South Korea. Nearly four years later, we came back with about as much as we went, with the glaring exception of having a two-year-old and newborn in tow.

Ten+ years of life came and went. We kept writing sporadically but the busy-ness of life wouldn't let up in order for us to commit our new (to others) music to a format. Finally, in 2019, Dan started demoing the songs that had yet to be recorded with his good friend and newfound collaborator Matt Frazer, with the goal of laying down final versions in April of 2020.

We all know how that went.

To be clear, this is not a pandemic record. Some of these songs are older than our 17-year-old marriage. We started writing together while we were dating. In fact, the opening track, So I Guess, is one of the first songs we ever wrote together. We just finally found a way to make it sound like we'd always heard it in our heads. A nice bookend, the last song and title track, The Things We Get Wrong, is one of our most recent. It almost didn't even make it on the album and was written well into the recording process. The whole process has been the epitome of journey, and we are grateful to have finally reached the destination as much as we are for the steps that got us here.

The Things We Get Wrong is our sophomore album with 11 tracks and clocks in at just over 48 minutes. We are impossibly proud of how it shaped up in the end.

Tracklisting

So I Guess
Let You Stay
If Only for the Night (a Prayer for Peace)
I Know Why People Leave
A Place
When I Was a Sailor
I Am the Wounded
God Hates (a Broken Heart)
Don't Go
You Might Be
The Things We Get Wrong