CCM EXCLUSIVE VIDEO PREMIERE
Amanda Danziger — ‘I Was Sleeping’ Acoustic

Amanda Danziger is a worship leader and songwriter from Allentown, PA who recently put out a 5-song EP title Head & Heart. This project is refreshingly elegant. It’s stripped-down, yet not simple. The string arrangements make it stand apart from all of the synth-heavy worship that currently dominates the worship scene. CCM is happy to premiere this acoustic performance of her song, “I Was Sleeping”…so check it out below.

Story Behind the Song — “I Was Sleeping”
When I was working as a Video Editor at a large corporation I came across a beautiful transcript from a man named Luis who was diagnosed with stage 4 colon cancer. After reading his transcript I was literally in tears at my desk and even in more tears just watching his entire video. He ended his 40 minute interview in the most beautiful way, the interviewer asked him “What makes life sparkle for you these days?” and the man replied with these words:

“What makes life sparkle these days? Waking up in the morning, not being sick. Just what everybody takes of for granted. The skies. The trees growing. The grass growing. The colors. When you put your feet on the floor in the morning. That’s not guaranteed. It’s sought. What you guys look at every day, in life, I look at as a blessing. It comes alive to me. Nature comes alive. I live in the mountains, and I sit outside on my porch. I’ll have a coffee, and it’s just the beauty of the mountains and the trees that fill my heart, and know that there’s life. That nothing’s dead. I look at a tree, and I says, ‘Man, just this past season. Yeah, you was dead. You know? You was dead, but the atmosphere changed. And here you are. You’re alive again.’ My hope is that my atmosphere’s gonna change, and I’ll be made alive again.”

His quote lived with me for many months and then he passed away in March 2018. His words really impacted me that I began to look at nature and trees differently… life around me. In April 2018 I found myself in the ER and had to get a spinal tap so they could see if I had anything wrong in my cerebral fluid. But after a few failed attempts and eventually getting sent to radiology to get the tap, I did not have a wonderful recovery from it. When I got sent home I ended up sleeping for 16-18 hours a day. I just didn’t want to get up, my energy, and my life was just not there. It was about three days of being home that my husband said, “we have to fix this, you’re going back to the ER.” And it turned out to be such a simple fix, a blood patch, to get me back on my feet again. I found few things that I wrote in my journal between being awake, a variations of Luis’ quote that eventually it turned into the melody of “I Was Sleeping.”

I was really honored when my friend Filipe Michael produced this song with this vision in mind along with his pianist friend Darius Smith. He then introduced the song to Allison and Antonio Marin, and they ended up writing an entire string quartet arrangement with the sounds of dreaming, life, and breath. It means a lot to me to record such a simple acoustic version of this song with my good friend, Josh Burgos, and to bring it to life in a whole other way. —Amanda Danziger

Watch the acoustic version here:

…OR…

Check out the entire EP on Spotify here:

Check out the entire EP on YouTube here:

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