Temple Veil

Greetings to all,

It's so crazy to be thinking that Thanksgiving is coming up this month, nevertheless, it'll be here soon. We were just discussing how bi-polar the lives of musicians are. There are so many ups and downs in this industry. It changes hourly at times it seems. In our other project, we carry an expected persona, and very rarely have the opportunity to blog and talk about a lot of things that really go on in our lives. Now having Temple Veil as a very different outlet, and being that this endeavor is as stripped down, raw, and real as it gets, we want to take the opportunity to be very transparent with anyone who is interested and share some of the amazing things that go on in our every day lives.

We are currently on day 3 of our 25-day first tour with Temple Veil in route from Lake City, FL to Bluffton, SC. The first 2 events went well and nothing crazy, unexpected, or out of the ordinary happened. What is crazy and extraordinary is the fact that we're even out here on the road. As full-time musicians, our primary source of income comes from live performances. Sure, there's CD sales, Itunes sales, online merch sales, royalties, etc, but after management, labels, and retailers take their chunk, the percentages actually received by the artist are very small. The expense of being on the road is a whole other story in and of itself. In other words, we only do this because we love it and we are called to it, and no shows equals no income. With that being said, it's been an interesting past few months since our we came off the road with our other project and started Temple Veil.

While we've been spending countless hours putting everything together for Temple Veil, our performances have been limited to here and there on weekends. During this time our diet has been very strong in Raman noodles and water to say the least, and when the brake line in our van broke a week and a half before tour, we thought it was all over. Transportation obviously is a critical part of touring, and just one week out, we had zero money to fix our current and only means of transportation for our passion and our livelihood.

The brainstorming began of course, and all of our thoughts revolved around how to come up with the money to fix this problem. We've faced so many similar situations before and it's always funny how we always seem to react the same way every time. All of our brilliant ideas to come up with the money failed, as often they do. Then we just so happened to receive a phone call from someone we just so happened to meet many months earlier when we happened to be touring through the same area, and he happened to know someone who happened to be willing to come and take a look at our van. A couple hours later, this guy driving a big cargo van whom we had never met just showed up exactly where we were. The next thing we knew, his van converted into a mobile shop and he had our van jacked up and tore apart, and without a word he disappeared and reappeared with the all the parts we needed. Before we knew it, the brake line, along with every minor issue with our van, had been fixed. Meanwhile, we were trying to figure out a way to tell this guy we didn't have the money for all of this amazing service he just showed up and provided. We asked him how much we owed him and he just smiled, said "Be blessed", jumped in his van, and drove off.

We have become such a money driven society. Our primary thoughts revolve around "If only I had the money, I could do X..." Even though we have the God of the universe at our fingertips, we can't even fathom the thought of praying for someone to show up and fix our vehicle for free. We pray for the money so we can take care of everything ourselves, but God is so much bigger than that. His perfect, amazing plan puts our weak, humanistic ideas to shame over and over again, and yet we still don't get it. In the midst of a collapsing economy where millionaires are going bankrupt and chaos is everywhere we turn, it is so important to remember what Jesus says in Matthew 10:29-31 that "not even a sparrow can fall to the ground without your Father knowing it, so don't be afraid; you are more valuable to Him than a whole flock of sparrows". We put our faith and security into money and so many things and then freak out when these things let us down. The only true security we have is God. No matter what happens, He's got us. He's way bigger that Wall Street.

Brysson
DeRock

~Temple Veil