Over the last three years since Julia Wade ended her seven-year soloist tenure at The Mother Church in Boston, she has toured successfully on the road across America in both churches and concert halls. Originally, when we announced the first of 3 tours, we had over a hundred groups in the U.S. alone inquiring as to what it would take to present a Julia Wade Concert in their city. Also requests came in from nearly all continents – especially from Europe and Africa.

We were so swamped with ideas and requests that we went right out and hired a manager to help sort it all out and book the concerts. The booking and setting up of these concerts became a full time job for all three of us amidst the rest of our work at Watchfire Music and was, even with a manager, simply too much to handle.

But handle it we did. Working with churches was the hardest part because essentially, they just didn’t have any experience in the endeavor. We had to teach them how to produce, how to promote, how to find a theater or how to set up their churches so that a professional concert could be presented. On rare occasions we would encounter a person who knew a little about how to do this, but it was very rare.

Doing the 40 or so concerts over those 3 tours was extremely back breaking and time consuming for both Julia and me and frustrating to the manager. Enormous amounts of time was spent teaching “how to”, and the rewards were often, when it came right down to it, that the interested parties were in over their heads financially and they simply couldn’t afford to produce the kind of professional concert that we knew we had to present.

By and large the concerts went well and audiences responded most enthusiastically, but we began to wonder, based on what it took out of us, was it worth it? We kept cutting fees down lower and lower to enable groups to present to the point that I could no longer go on the road with Julia and produce the technical parts of the concerts like sound, lighting and staging. Because she loved doing it and also because she sold CDs extremely well after the concerts, she decided to learn what I did and produce her own concerts herself on the road.

Very, very tough to do this …

Either be a producer or a performer. Don’t ever try to do both. Each job is simply far too complex if you’re going to really do it right.

She would come home off the road triumphant, but beaten.

We decided that it just wasn’t worth it, and began to look more deeply at the idea of “instead of going to you to present, bring you to us.”

The Solution — The Webcast — Watch for Part 2 – Coming very soon!