As I sat in JFK last night, delayed again and again on my way home from Gospel Music Week, I had a bit of a scare: I thought I lost my digital voice recorder! That would have been a tragedy, because I had some great interviews with almost two dozen artists. The interviews are for cover stories in the Christian Voice Magazine and some other publications, so I’ll slowly be transcribing the interviews.
But here are a few highlights from the week:

Attendance at GMA was low this year. The economy was certainly to blame, but word on the streets is that the radio folks have started their own event that will debut later this fall so they bypassed GMA. There are some rumors about why that happened, but whatever the reason, it accounted for about 2/3 less folks there from radio. Typically, you’ll find several stations broadcasting live, for example. I only saw one radio station booth set up this year.

Of course, that brings me to the second obvious GMA change: media wasn’t credentialed. That means we didn’t need a badge or approval to schedule interviews. It also meant that we didn’t get an official GMA badge, and so didn’t have official access to the convention center and showcases. So I have no idea what was going on in the convention center this year; there may have been radio booths down there but they’re normally right in the hotel. The new policy left a bit of a bad taste in the mouths of more than a few media because it sent a message that implied media wasn’t important to the event. I for one missed having the OK to go anywhere I wanted during the event. I found out as the week went on that no one was checking badges, but GMA made a very big deal about media having to buy a showcase badge that I didn’t attend on principle. (Really, do you want me to cover the event or not?)
All of that to say that GMA this year ended up being much more mellow and relaxed than the past few years. Because of the media credentialing confusion, several labels did invite only luncheons and showcases for media, which meant that rather than running around to do interviews throughout the week, we got to spend a huge block of time eating with the artists and then just hanging out. The labels showcased their new projects and we got to hear some stories behind the songs. Loved it all.
In fact, the best parts of GMA are the unscheduled times. For example, I goofed up my time with “Jesus People” filmmakers Dan Ewald, Rajeev Singamoney and Jason Naumann. So rather than have an interview, we hung out for a long time in the hotel cafe, laughing and goofing around. Wednesday, I spent hours sitting in the cafe with artists Stephanie Pauline and Gina Tarajano, and JGRV internet radio folks Angel and Gary Jeffery.
Some of the best interviews? Jason Crabb, Big Daddy Weave’s Mike Weaver, Dreampilots, Press Play, The Wrecking (we had lunch and hung out for quite a while) Aaron Sprinkle and Joy Whitlock. OK, honestly? I didn’t have a single bad interview. And I got to spend some time with Fireflight – I’ll tell you more about that later.
I had asked readers to submit questions for artists this year, and while no one did on this blog (bad) I did get a good handful on my Facebook page. So almost every artist had the chance to answer the question “What is Christian music”, and direct their answer to a non-Christian audience. I’ll showcase those answers over the next few weeks.
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