THE LISTENING LOUNGE
The Spaces Between The Sound
New Album -
Always: Lyric Video
Where the Noise Fades: 2013
Christian Album of the Year/UMA 2014)
Where the Noise Fades stands as a timeless testament to faith, resilience, and the power of music to heal. This worship EP was a collaborative project between Drew Reese and the Harmonic Collective team within The Warrior Worship Project ministry, created as a music therapy endeavor to help navigate the complexities of post-deployment challenges and PTSD. Receiving the Christian Album of the Year honor at the 2014 Utah Music Awards, Where the Noise Fades remains a powerful piece of work that captures a poignant moment in Drew’s life and ministry.
With tracks like “Mountain,” “We Stand Together in Worship,” and the listener favorite “Always,” this album encapsulates Drew’s journey of faith, recovery, and gratitude before stepping away from music ministry. Each song invites listeners into an experience of worship and solidarity, resonating deeply with veterans and anyone who has sought peace amid personal battles.
Although the Warrior Worship Project ministry has since disbanded, and Drew has moved on from ministry, Where the Noise Fades holds an enduring place in his story. It reflects a season when faith, music, and community were integral to healing—a chapter that, while closed, continues to offer a source of comfort and connection for those who listen.
The Song Story: Mountain
Redemption: 2013
Redemption is Drew Reese’s transformative worship album, a project that took two years to complete and stands as a powerful expression of faith, resilience, and healing. Created as his first full studio project since joining the military, Redemption invites listeners into a worship experience that’s both personal and universal, featuring tracks like "Facedown," "the 23rd Psalm," "Doxology," "Only You," and a fresh recording of “Awakening,” made popular during the Passion 2010 conference.
Following the tragic events of September 11th, Drew felt a calling to serve, joining the U.S. military in a move that would change his life profoundly. After returning from deployment, Drew began facing the challenging symptoms of PTSD. This dark period became a turning point, as he sought healing through his faith in Jesus, who provided the strength to confront his struggles. This journey, reflected in Redemption, is what Drew describes as a personal “awakening,” an experience of leaving the old self behind to let Jesus take center stage.
Having been “exiled” from both the LDS music industry and his community for being gay, Drew found himself on a path of profound spiritual transition. Redemption is a testament to this journey, a faith transition from Mormonism to non-denominational Christianity, capturing the struggles, hope, and grace Drew discovered along the way. Inspired to “Make Jesus Famous,” Drew crafted Redemption as a tool for recovery and worship, weaving together his story and a message of God’s unfailing love.
In Redemption, Drew draws listeners into the heart of worship while sharing a story of resilience. The album resonates with his belief that every struggle can lead to a profound awakening, a chance to center life around faith and healing.
Next Door To Eden: 2000
Debut Album
Drew was nineteen years old when he made this record. That’s the first thing to understand about it.
He started his own label — Sentinel Music Company — to release it, and somehow landed co-producers Greg Simpson of Highway Records and Jim Funk, the songwriter behind Kenny Rogers’ “Buy Me a Rose,” to help him make it. It was also the first project he made with Jen Marco, who co-produced and whose creative partnership with Drew would last for decades.
Released under his full name, Andrew Reese Howells, the album lives in two worlds at once. Drew had spent his late teens absorbing Christian contemporary music that the LDS community around him largely hadn’t heard, and he wanted to build a bridge — covers of songs like Steven Curtis Chapman’s “Waiting for Lightning” alongside original material written for this moment. The title track came last, written on top of Ensign Peak looking out over the Salt Lake Valley. It sounds like exactly what it is: a Christian pop song made at the turn of a millennium, full of the feeling that something new was beginning.
Some of the album’s most personal moments are in the details. “Let Him Heal Your Heart” — an EFY song written by award-winning LDS songwriter and producer Tyler Castleton — was rearranged by Drew and Tyler together into a quiet piano and cello meditation. “In the Shadow of the Moon,” co-written with his high school friend Amber Bittinger, was the first song Drew and Jen Marco ever recorded together. And “Middle of Nowhere,” the closing track, is a solo piano piece Drew wrote and performed alone — a melody that would quietly resurface twenty-five years later on The Spaces Between the Sound.
It holds that moment without apology.
Next Door To Eden: 2000
Growing Older — Michael Webb,
Arranged & Produced by Drew Reese
Michael Webb has been a cherished voice in Utah’s religious music scene since the late eighties, with a legacy that runs through Embryo Music, Highway Records, award-winning albums, and a generation of EFY recordings that shaped young LDS listeners — including Drew himself. So when the two came together over a demo for Webb’s first original release in over a decade, it felt less like a new collaboration and more like something that had been a long time coming.
The song is a meditation on sanctification — not the comfortable version, but the honest one. Am I actually growing, or am I just getting older? Am I becoming more faithful, more merciful, more like the person I set out to be? The lyric sits with that discomfort and reaches, carefully and without pretense, toward grace. Drew produced and arranged the track, adding his own background vocals alongside Jen Marco, whose presence brings exactly the atmospheric warmth and weight the song needed.
As Michael puts it: “I hope with each passing year, I look a little more like Jesus.”
It’s a standout. Simple, direct, and quietly devastating in the way that only the most honest songs manage to be.
Out of Print: But Not Forgotten
"Place of Healing - Songs of the Savior"
Place of Healing — Songs of the Savior was produced by Drew Reese and Brad Haslam in 2006 for Inspired Ideas, a division of Shadow Mountain Records and Deseret Book. It was created in the long shadow of September 11th, during a moment when so many people were still trying to find language for grief, fear, uncertainty, and faith. Not as a reaction, but as an answer to a question people were quietly carrying: where do you go when the world stops making sense?
The answer this album offers is the same one it always has been — toward each other, and toward something larger than ourselves.
This 12-track various artists album brings together brand new original songs written specifically for the project with carefully chosen re-releases of beloved favorites. The result is an album that feels both familiar and fresh, rooted in music people already loved while opening space for voices and stories they had not yet heard.
Alex Boyé opens the album with Faith Endures, a haunting, contemporary reimagining of a beloved hymn arranged by Tyler Castleton. It does not ease you in. It meets you where you are and pulls you forward. There is strength in the arrangement, but also ache. It sets the tone for the whole project: faith not as something easy or decorative, but as something that endures because it has already been tested.
Kathrine Nelson’s Heal Me, written by Jenny Phillips, follows with something quieter and more interior. It is the sound of someone genuinely asking. Not performing belief. Not pretending everything is fine. Just reaching toward the possibility that healing can still happen.
Michael R. Hicks then offers the title track, Place of Healing, as a father-and-son instrumental. Michael wrote the song and plays piano, while his father plays bassoon. No words. Just space. And sometimes that is exactly what healing requires. The piece gives the listener room to breathe, to remember, to grieve, to sit still for a moment without being told what to feel.
Strength Beyond My Fears was written and performed by Drew Reese while deployed on mission with the United States Air Force. It is not metaphorical. It is a literal prayer from the field, asking for courage to make it one more day. The darkness in the song is not abstract, and neither is the faith he is reaching for. That tension is what makes it hold. It is the sound of someone trying to believe while still standing in the middle of the thing they are trying to survive.
Alex Boyé returns with Let His Love Reach You, a gentler second movement to his opening track. Where Faith Endures feels like a call to keep going, this song feels more like an invitation to let yourself be reached. It carries the central message of the album in a simple, direct way: that divine love is not passive, distant, or theoretical. It moves toward us.
David Tinney performs The Man With Many Names, drawn from Michael McLean’s 1995 allegorical oratorio The Garden, one of McLean’s most celebrated works alongside The Forgotten Carols. Tinney was the original voice of the Gardener in that recording — the voice chosen to carry the story of salvation through the allegory of a gardener and his garden. The Man With Many Names remains one of that work’s luminous centerpieces, a declaration of who Christ is, rendered in melody.
Jessie Clark delivers one of the album’s most unexpected and beautiful turns with Our Savior’s Love / Abide With Me, tracked with Ryan Shupe on fiddle and Rich Dixon on guitar. The arrangement goes somewhere formal worship rarely dares. It sounds like a back porch, a fireside, the kind of faith pioneer ancestors carried across a continent on foot — unpolished and unafraid. That was exactly the sound Drew was after: something sacred, but human. Something reverent, but not trapped behind stained glass.
Brett Raymond brings Do Likewise My Friend into the mid-2000s with a warm acoustic pop treatment. The original nineties EFY recording was big, sweeping, and orchestral in the way that era often was. This version keeps the heart of the song and reframes it for a new decade, reminding you why it lasted long enough to deserve another life. It shifts the album from receiving comfort to extending it outward. Healing is not just something we ask for. It is something we are asked to offer.
Octapella’s a cappella arrangement of Nearer My God to Thee / Beautiful Savior follows with no instruments and no production to hide behind — just voices stacked into something ethereal and quietly devastating. It is one of the album’s purest moments. Stripped down, direct, and deeply human.
Then comes Ninety and Nine, an original song written by Stephanie Smith specifically for this album. It tells the story of the lost sheep from the inside. Not the parable as doctrine, but the parable as confession. Drew Reese arranged and produced the track, playing both piano and accordion, building the sonic landscape around wandering, shame, foolish pride, and the shepherd’s hand reaching down anyway. The instrumentation does not ornament the story. It inhabits it. Then Stephanie Smith opens her mouth, and her hauntingly beautiful vocal carries the full emotional weight of what it means to be lost, and what it means to be found.
Fredie Ashby follows with Further Than Your Grace Can Reach — a final assurance, a last exhale before the album closes. It is a song about the reach of grace, and the refusal of divine love to stop at the border of our fear, our shame, or our distance.
That close belongs to Drew Reese’s cover of Like a Lighthouse, written by Michael Webb. Drew co-arranged the piece with Tyler Castleton, who also plays piano on the recording. Into the arrangement, Drew wove Lead, Kindly Light, the hymn John Henry Newman wrote in 1833 while stranded on a ship in fog, unsure where he was or where he was headed. Newman asked only to be led one step at a time. Two compositions about finding your way in the dark, separated by more than 150 years, settle into each other like they were always meant to be the same song.
Place of Healing — Songs of the Savior has been out of print for years. Many of these recordings are no longer available or easily accessible elsewhere, so they are being shared here for archive purposes as well. But more than that, they are here because the music still matters.
These songs were created for people trying to find their footing after one of the hardest moments in modern American life. They were made for grief, for uncertainty, for faith under pressure, for quiet nights, for long drives, for the moment when you do not need someone to explain everything — you just need something to help you breathe again.
They were made for exactly this. For whenever you need them.