Album Notes

Hi. I'm Martha Maria, the voice, songwriter/composer and multi-instrumentalist that is MarMelodian.

A little about me....I live in a small white house in the woods in Oak Ridge, Tennessee in the shadow of the Cumberland Mountains. That little white house is also where most of my music is produced and recorded. When I'm not working on music, I'm wife to Bob and mother to Joe and Walker.

This "Spirit Songs" cd is based on the text of "The Course in Miracles" and other Christian/metaphysical sources. As you probably already know, the "Course in Miracles" is a book about love and forgiveness that was channeled to Dr. Helen Schucman (by a voice she identified as Jesus Christ) and transcribed by Dr. William Thetford, in the late 1960's and early 1970's. A few years back a friend asked me to go to her "Course in Miracles" study group. I had studied the Course some years before but was no longer part of a group. Anyway, I went with her and while I was there, someone said, "I wish we had something like a rap or a song or something to help us remember all this." And I remember very clearly, it was just like a little bell went off in my head and I heard a voice say, "I can do that." The next morning, while I was sitting in the Kroger parking lot, the first song came to me. I went straight home and recorded it in my home recording studio. The rest of the album was completed in the next couple of weeks and without doing any special packaging, I sold it to the members of that original group. Then, I just kind of put it aside and forgot about it. But a couple of months ago, I joined Oprah's e-mail list, and one day there was a quote from Marianne Williamson that said something to the effect that we don't really know what our talents are for but the Holy Spirit does know... the gist of the message being that some projects choose you instead of you choosing them. As soon as I read that, I remembered how I had felt chosen to do the "Course in Miracles" songs and decided maybe it was time for me to publish my "Miracle" music more widely. So, I took my original recordings to one of the greatest recording engineers in Nashville, Randall Merryman, and asked him to master them. Randall worked his magic and the result is my cd "Spirit Songs" on CD Baby. This whole project has been a blessing to me and I hope that it will bless many others as well.