“Shoes Of Faith” is the second song for Daniel on the record but I believe it was the last song I wrote for him while he was still alive. In fact, I may have written it either late in the spring of 2003 or early that summer as we started rehearsing for Daniel to track the drums for the record.
As I mentioned in the blog for “Daniel (Here For You)”, this song came in the season where Daniel seemed to have turned the corner. He was the direct inspiration – so much so that he probably should have had a co-writer credit. I’m getting older, so the memories are slipping. But I really think he had a pair of shoes that he called his shoes of faith. It was a testament to what he’d walked through. He would be the first to admit that his feet literally and metaphorically took him to places he shouldn’t have gone. Sometimes we do that in life. Even the most sanctified and those who have walked with the Lord a long time can succumb to the sinful nature inside of the human heart.
The good news was that Daniel’s feet had taken him back to where he belonged. He was the joyful person I had remembered from our early days in high school when I first met him. Like David pleaded for in the Psalms, God had restored the joy of salvation to Daniel. And it was reflective in almost every aspect of his life.
While it was a joy to see it and experience it with him, it made the tragedy of his death that much harder to bear. It also made it hard to sing this song and put it on the record. But I wanted to remember Daniel this way. When I listen to it now, I smile as I recall all of the good memories. There was even good and joy in the hard conversations and the difficult times because Daniel was just that kind of person. That’s the way I remember Daniel.
This song sounds very different from every other track on the album. The reason is because I tracked my guitar with Sean playing the drum track. I think he played to a click track, but I tracked with him live. Hence the reason the guitar is completely in sync with the drums. Zack also showed out on the bass on this one. His riff over the last choruses in the fade out was amazing. It was a simple production, but it is by far the tightest sounding song on the entire record. Let me know what you think about the story and the original album version of “Shoes Of Faith”.
