I‘ve always been fond of old church-produced records from the 50’s and 60’s, with their low-budget, weird monochrome graphics on the front covers and unknown street addresses printed on the back. Detroit had more than it’s own share of these back in the day, but digging through the bins of your local thrift you would come across some from other cities as well - Chicago, Cincinnatti, Pittsburgh - as well as never-heard-of rural areas and southern towns like Nashville and Jacksonville. Everybody wanted to put out a record, and churches had the means to scrape the funds together to make it happen. I feel a real kinship with those who made them and identify with them for a lot of reasons - their enthusiasm, their often amateurish approach, their naivete, and their DIY determination to try to make something happen in spite of knowing their almost-certain destiny of obscurity. They had the musicians, they had the songs, they already had mics and a PA. They just needed to rent a tape machine from the TV repair place. The pastor could handle the promotion end, and the janitor could engineer. You never know, if things go well they might even fix up the bus and take it all on the road. Roll the tape. Anything was possible with God’s grace.