BIOGRAPHY: A Desperate Season
In late 2008, after a long hiatus from music, Jim started plotting his return to the Nashville music scene, launching into a new album with a five-year backlog of songs. The title is “A Desperate Season,” and Weber is playing everything himself. “I’m having a great time on this record. The process is such fun, even though the subject matter is pretty intense.”
A Desperate Season is a raw expression of struggle and heartache. “I’ve had a couple of hard years, and I’m using music to talk it out. I’ve spent all this time in CiViL Groups, listening to students. Now I’m letting the music listen to me.” These reflective, soulful, often sad songs are the ones Jim wants to play these days. They tell a personal story of lost and renewed hope, with all the real-world subtleties of a master songwriter. It is a story you won’t want to miss.
The Desperate Season lasted two years, starting with serious burnout in the spring of 2008 that descended into a dark valley of marital conflict that fall. In 2009 the Great Recession shook the financial world, and Weber watched as his donation-dependant ministry as it crumbled. At the end of the two years that Weber says were the worst years of his life, Weber was left with a survivor’s faith. “I’ve been clinging to God out of necessity. There was no other reason to stay faithful, keep working, keep hoping, or even keep living.”
Just weeks ago, Weber witnessed the closing chapter of his Desperate Season. “I got a chance to go to Haiti a few weeks after the earthquake. I was priviledged to share the grief and hope of those heroic, suffering people, and I realized that if God was going to help them rebuild their country, then he was also going to help me rebuild. I was wondering how I was going to end this album. Now I know. It ends with a message of hope. There may be an awful struggle ahead, but Haiti is going to make it. I’m going to make it, too.”
While the songs for A Desperate Season are all written, several of them in Haiti, the recording is still in progress. Songs will be available for listening on this site soon. In the meantime, you can listen to some of the songs from “A Desperate Season” at this link.
Song Writing
Jim Weber has a long track record of music in Nashville, ironic for a singer-songwriter who likes to run long distances (three marathons and six half marathons). Jim started fast out of the blocks with the early eighties Amy Grant hit, “Singing A Love Song,” just six months after he graduated from college. “I had written the song in my dorm room after watching a Nightline story on Donna Summer. She was the hottest thing around at the time, and I was a wanna-be songwriter. So I wrote about those feelings, not knowing that a year later the song would grant its own wish.”
During the following decades Jim’s songs would be recorded by other well-known contemporary Christian music artists, including Debby Boone, Kathy Troccoli, Billy Sprague, and the Imperials, as well as popular Gospel artists like Helen Baylor and the Goodman Family. Thousands of youth choirs performed Jim’s two Dove Award winning musicals, The Race Is On and Friends…forever, co-written with Billy Sprague and Nan Gurley.
Jim Weber is a recording artist as well as a songwriter. He has released seven albums and is currently at work on number eight. Weber’s sensitive lyrics explore the depths of the heart. His song “Can’t Talk,” a poignant description of the alienation between teens and parents, is still received in tearful silence by audiences of all ages. Weber’s musical style is rhythmic acoustic guitar rock. Whether the song is quiet finger-picking, swampy blues or driving rock’n'roll, you can feel the phantom drummer, even when Jim is playing solo.
Discography
- Worshipper’s Dance
- Many Mountains
- Build This House – Soundtrack From A Mission Trip
- Looking Back – A Compilation
- Small
- Diamonds In the Dust
- The Circle Around the Cross
- The Long Lonley Night
- Untitled No. 1
All of these albums are available in some form on the Albums page.