Staci Frenes plays Young Life benefit Concert
On a warm Friday evening, June 1, 2019, Staci Frenes & Band teamed up with the high school ministry YoungLife to play a benefit concert in the Livermore Wine Country. The band performed a set of old favorites, recent songs and cover tunes amid the backdrop of a setting sun over vineyards that stretched in every direction.
Frenes’s personal connection with YoungLife runs deep. “When I was a 12-year-old, painfully shy wallflower who had just moved from Grand Forks, North Dakota to California I was invited by my 7th grade gym teacher Miss Lopez to go to a YoungLife winter camp where I heard for the first time that God loved ME,” Frenes told the crowd “That one invitation changed the entire trajectory of my life.”
Concertgoers raised $25,000 to send kids from area public junior high and high schools to similar camps like the one Frenes attended. Talk about full circle, says Frenes, who also said she was grateful to be a part of this life-changing work.
NEW ALBUM NOW AVAILABLE
Staci's new album: Unpathed Waters Undreamed Shores is now available HERE and wherever music is sold.
This new collection of songs joins Staci with her longtime songwriting collaborator and producer, Nate Sabin and is inspired by what Staci calls 'big life changes' including deep personal losses, and ever-shifting roles of parenting and career. Lyrically, the songs rely on the imagery of rivers and oceans to explore the messy, unpredictable and ultimately hopeful process of transformation.
The first line of the title track conveys with cheerful resignation the necessity of letting go of what we can't control: Change is a river and it keeps on rolling/You never get to where you think you're going, This realistic optimism, along with an acknowledgement of the constant tension between disappointment and hope, are themes running through the entire album.
In Storms, a song written for her young-adult children, Staci expresses this tension poignantly: Everybody tries to stay protected from the dangers of this uncharted life/but beauty is never where you expect it and in the ruins treasures hide/So my love, be warned/ I wish you storms.
One reviewer writes, "There's a hopefulness to this record that people need to hear now more than ever. The songs don't shy away from the realities of pain and loss, but there's an underlying reassurance in all of it that says: it's going to be okay."