The Vision And Making Of “You Make Me Feel Like I Belong” Video.

My wife, Judi, had a milestone birthday in October of 2022. I took her on a special trip to London, England. It was a great week. However, there was another gift I wanted to give her for her birthday that year. I wanted to write her a song and do a special video of it. Unfortunately, I never did make that happen.

On my return trip from London, I made a pledge to myself I would make the video for her next birthday.

I wanted the video to be special. I’m not a singer by any means. I knew I needed some help with my voice. My intent was not to become a great singer, but simply to find someone who might be able to help me make the best of the little singing talent I did have.

In January of 2023 I started taking weekly voice lessons. I was committed. I went to my lessons every week for five months. Yes, five months. That’s how much work needed to be done.

In November of 2021 I had started on a journey to play the guitar. I had been practicing every day since. Wanting to be good enough to play for this song gave me further motivation to keep up my daily practices, which I did right up to the day of my recording.

I didn’t have a specific plan for how I was going to write Judi’s song. But part of my daily practice was to take about ten minutes to simply improvise new music. My intent wasn’t to necessarily write Judi’s song. It was merely a creative process I started. I now have over a hundred parts of different songs. One of these, on March 23, 2023, happen to feel like the beginnings of the right song for Judi.

That’s how it began.

At first it was a series of chords with some simple lyrics. I expanded the lyrics and worked on them for a few weeks. Within a few months I moved to fingerpicking those chords. At some point in May, I knew the song was ready. I made no more changes to it.

A few years earlier I reconnected with a childhood friend, Mike LeBlanc. He has been a vocalist in various bands over the years, and still performs to this day. He has a great recording studio, Muscle Vox Audio (M.V.A.) in Dundas. I had been there a few times. At first, I was merely going to record the song myself. I had started looking at buying some recording equipment. Then, I said to myself, I should get Mike to record it for me in his studio. So, that’s what I ended up doing.

My initial thought was to record the audio and video on the same day. Mike advised me it would be best to do them separately.

I setup a recording for September 29, 2023 at M.V.A. for my official recording. However, not having any video and audio recording experience. I didn’t realize it would be better to record the audio track first, then use it as the basis for the video recording. I thought I could simply sing the song for the video recording and the audio and video would magically line up. Little did I know.

I had originally planned on getting a friend to record the video, but then I decided since I was getting the audio professionally recorded, I should get a professional to record the video. I found Evan Bilon through a media team my company works with.

On September 28 we shot the video. I chose the site where Judi and I met thirty-six years earlier at a spiritual retreat. The Sisters of St. Joseph’s Motherhouse convent where the retreat closed back in 2019. Columbia International College purchased the property and planned on using it for school residences and classes. However, the property was currently vacant. I contacted Columbia and received their permission to shoot the video on their site.

We spent about thirty minutes doing drone footage. The opening scene of the cross and dome are beautiful. The shot to represents how God is and has always been at the centre of our marriage and lives. We then moved on to shooting the song itself. I merely played the song and Evan shot me from different angles and distances. The shoot went great.

I stepped into the recording studio the next day ready to lay down the audio for the video. Mike had a great plan. He wanted to record the guitar first and then we’d record the vocals over top.

Apparently, that’s how it’s done.

I’ve never done any singing prior to this, let alone music studio recording. As simple as playing the song without the vocals might sound, it wasn’t so simple for me. Mike patiently tried to help, encouraging me to sing it in my head. I couldn’t do it.

So, we ended up recording the vocals and the guitar at the same time. All these attempts at recording the guitar separately made me a little flustered. When you combine that with adrenaline, I ended up recorded the song with a faster timing then what I had been practicing for months and recorded for the video.

What a disaster.

When Evan mixed the video and the audio recordings the timing did not line up. As much as he tried, he couldn’t get my lips to sync with the audio recording.

He sent me a draft. I hated it. There’s no way I was giving this to Judi for her birthday.

I said to Evan, we have to reshoot the video with using the audio track. We were running out of time. We had one weekend left to do the shoot. Evan was able to accommodate the shoot and we planned to reshoot the video in three days.

For the next three days I practiced playing over the audio track so that the video would line up. I practiced for two hours all three remaining days.

We recorded the video. Evan did a great job lining up the new video with the audio recording.

I played the video for Judi at a small family birthday party.

She loved it.

You can view the video You Make Me Feel Like I Belong by clicking here.

Because of the increased timing of the audio from my intended version, some of the lyrics may not come across to everyone. Here they are:

You Make Me Feel Like I Belong – Words and music by Steve Authier