Over the past 10 months or so I’ve been involved with what has become the most awesome project I’ve ever worked on. It’s actually been dozens of different projects but they all had one common theme - the new newsboys album, Born Again. Newsboys have long been one of my favorite bands… and this is one of their best albums ever.

I’ve worked on two newsboys albums in the past but this time around I was given a bit more creative freedom. Newsboys were working with a few new writers on this album - Juan Otero and Seth Mosley (The Write Brothers) who are both so nice and amazingly talented. I’m so thrilled I got to be a part of this project from it’s infancy when we were listening to Write Brothers demos at Inpop. I had the pleasure of going to a recording session at The Write Brother’s studio when they were tracking vocals for Born Again with Mike Tait way back in September of last year. Then around December of last year I started on the packaging, was involved in the cover shoot with my friend David Molnar (who is a crazy talented photographer) and then began the whirlwind press onslaught… I’m pretty sure I made over 100 banner ads, print ads, website splash pages, email templates and more to advertise the album.

Around early May I believe is when we finally finished packaging… which ended up almost exactly how I wanted it to look, which is rare. I also got to use a bunch of my live photos of newsboys from the 2 festivals they brought me to in Europe in the inside packaging. I love it when I get to use my own photos in my design work.

The album finally released last week to rave reviews and the best newsboys street week ever - 45,311 units. It was #4 on the Billboard overall chart, beneath only Sting, Eminem and MIA.

Right before we hit street date, July 13th, Juan Otero contacted me to do a website for the Write Brothers so they would have something online once the album dropped. I was thrilled to get to work with him yet again, and a few days ago we launched WriteBrosMusic.com. Check it out to hear some of The Write Brothers amazing work and keep up with their projects… you won’t want to miss anything that they work on!

Working for a record label is quite strange. For one, the inner workings of a record label are not glamorous, despite everyone expecting them to be. I sit in a windowless office with plain walls that is very cold. If you had to guess from walking in off the street what I did upon inspection of my office, you’d probably think I was a poorly dressed accountant (creatives are allowed to come to work looking like  homeless bums, right?).

This is where I spend roughly half the year doing random things like fixing the printer, setting up free download pages, updating our newsletter server… all stuff that is super exciting. Then December hits. We go from 0 to 60 in 1 second flat. Inpop tells to me that we have 4 new releases coming out around roughly the same time - late spring/summer. I’ll be doing the photography for some and full packaging and everything else for the rest of them.

In early December we immediately start work arranging the photoshoots. I’m working on finding locations for Jimmy Needham and after hours of driving around, googling and planning we spend an entire day doing nothing but taking photos (see my previous post for those!) It’s fun, but exhausting. The next few weeks I spend editing and organizing those photos and then I start on album cover comps. We meet with Jimmy and his manager to discuss ideas, and after a few weeks I submit some comps. Weeks and weeks of revisions and scrapped comps later, we arrive on a final. Here is a peek at just some of the comps we went through to get the final: http://gallery.me.com/breezy421#100159 (don’t distribute these, please!).

Amid all the Jimmy Needham chaos, we have the newsboys AND Article One photoshoots. Both in the first weeks of January. I did the Article One shoot with just me and the guys down by the river in downtown Nashville. It was probably the best photoshoot I’ve ever done because I’ve done so many shoots with these guys we’re so comfortable with each other now that we knock it out of the park right away. It was super fast and simple and everyone was happy.

Here are some of those pics:

Then came the newsboys shoot. I got to assist a photographer I’ve long admired on this shoot - Mr. David Molnar. My main contribution was getting catering. When I brought it all back I realized that the dude at the burger joint didn’t label any of the 16 different meals so everybody just started eating everybody else’s food… we were way to hungry to care.

After that I began newsboys cover comps. First for the EP, then the full album. All the while doing Article One EP comps and packaging and Jimmy Needham comps. Oh not to mention a big load of freelance projects on the side, like this photoshoot for Alissa… she’s an extremely talented artist that the one and only Paul Colman is working with & producing.

All of February was a huge blur. I finished the newsboys EP and Article One EP packaging and I really liked how they turned out.

Then it was time to work on Superchick packaging. Which I did in one night. Over at Max & Shara’s house. We started at 5pm. Ended at midnight. Max had already completed the cover which is 1/2 the battle. Early that week I think is when we finally settled on the final newsboys and Jimmy covers. I’m getting my time all screwed up but that’s what happens when you don’t really know what day it is to begin with because you go to bed at 4 or 5am every night and wake up the same day a few hours later. It also really throws you off to sleep for an hour on your lunch break which I do regularly. Ha. I love my life, I really do.

There are so many updates, I don’t even know where to begin!

I got to do a very spontaneous and fun photoshoot with my friend Grace Campbell yesterday (with Rebecca Walton and Gabby Campbell assisting - thanks guys!) Those pics will be up shortly and I’m very excited about them, because Grace is totally gonna be the next Miley Cyrus.

I’ve been doing tons of shoots lately (yay!) thus I finally updated completely revamped my photography website, not with much new work (yet) but a fresh look and FLASH! TONS of new work is coming soon though, please visit and tell me what you think of the redesign (breezybaldwinphoto.com).

In other photo shoot news, I got to do another shoot with the awesome Everyday Sunday. This time a REAL shoot for the album packaging and everything, not just a random for-fun shoot… not that there’s anything wrong with those, but you know. First location was actually a spontaneous last-minute thing because the boys discovered when they got in town that their hotel was AMAZING and so we did a shoot there the night before our scheduled shoot at building 8 in the factory the following day (also the home of my church!) which they very generously donated to us! Without further ado, here are some shots:

The name of their new album is “Best Night Of Our Lives” so naturally we were going for a very fun night-time atmosphere. I’m also doing all the packaging for this album as well, and we already have a final cover, which you can see below. First time a band has really given me almost total creative freedom, which was really nice to have. For the cover I used a pic I took in NYC and some long exposure shots (the album title is all my handwriting with a light pen in my bedroom … lol)

In other packaging news, we finally got the new newsboys final packaging inserts today, and they look pretty sweet. Very clean and sharp. Definitely my most challanging project to date. What we started with and what we ended up with is just mind-bogglingly different… I’ll have to write an entire post dedicated to the design process of album packaging and use that one as an example. Craziness. So much fun though, but an equal amount of stress!

With all that I really feel like I’m about to enter a brand new chapter of my life, now that I’m finally working on some super high profile stuff (yay!) AND I’m turning 21 next week, going to 6 countries this summer AND I have tons of really exciting projects lined up, including a music video……. the best is yet to come for sure.