Anna Brown’s mission travels have taken her out around the world. Yet different stops around the globe have also launched her on a musical journey, one she hopes reaches in, to the human heart.
Brown was 15 when she went on a mission trip to Kenya. During that trip, a friend played the “Hamilton” soundtrack for her on a laptop, and Brown was hooked.
The home-schooled 18-year-old admits she was not into history up to that point, but after she fell in love with that musical, history “was my new obsession.”
Her newfound enthusiasm for something that once didn’t interest her made her wonder: What if someone could do that for the Bible?
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Her own answer to that question is “His Story the Musical,” a multi-genre collection of songs she has recorded and begun posting online. The release of the whole musical is set for April 14, Palm Sunday.
With the songs, Brown endeavors to tell Jesus’ life story in a way that piques the interest of people who aren’t particularly interested in reading the Bible.
“A lot of people won’t, and a lot of people will never know what it says,” she said. “I want to make this in a way that’s really simple and easy to understand. …
“I wanted to make it so these characters seem real and reachable. … It shows how Jesus would interact with them — the grace, the love, everything.”
It took some time for her to shift from simply thinking someone should write the type of musical she imagined to attempting to write one herself. She began playing with chords on a piano and wrote a song about the birth of Jesus.
She showed it to one of her younger sisters, Rachel, now 15, who worked with her on piano chords and harmonies. As they tried different note combinations, there were moments they looked at each other and sensed this was something special.
In 2017, Anna went on another mission trip, this time to Peru. She packed a toy piano and wrote music during down time.
“It was a kid’s toy,” she said. “I ended up writing probably 10 or 15 songs on it.”
She then returned home to Ukraine, where her family was doing mission work at the time. She played the new songs for her parents, Joshua Brown and Sarah Janisse Brown, a former Fortville town councilwoman. They were supportive of her desire to make the musical, and they’ve largely funded production of the songs through Thinking Tree Books and Dyslexia Games, learning materials they developed and sell online. Some of those materials were inspired by their journey in educating Anna.
In the beginning, Anna didn’t imagine the production-quality recordings of the songs that are being released now. “We were just going to do the best we could, and it would be recorded in our basement,” she recalls.
Yet a friend in Ukraine said the task was one for a professional. After the friend traveled to Poland and heard the symphony in Warsaw, he connected the Browns with producer Pawel Zarecki. Zarecki added some musical flourishes to Brown’s score and booked an award-winning string quartet to lay down an instrumental track.
“There were so many times … there would just be a door that would open,” Brown said.
Video footage for that first song she wrote, “Arrive,” was recorded in Poland. Videos for that song and another, “Hey It’s Me” — in which Mary learns she’ll give birth to the Messiah — were released before Christmas.
A few more singles have been released, such as “40 Days.” It’s about Jesus’ fasting in the wilderness after his baptism, and it was released on March 6, Ash Wednesday — the start of the 40-day holy season of Lent.
Many of the vocals were recorded in Los Angeles. The performers gathered there in November included Gabriel Brown — Black Gryph0n to his 1.8 million YouTube subscribers and Becky the Loon to fans of “Finding Dory.” He voices The Angel, Peter, Satan and a Pharisee.
Anna Brown and her family watched video after video on YouTube looking for vocalists. Giovanni Beatty heard from them between shows at the Interlakes Summer Theatre in New Hampshire, where he was part of the cast performing four musicals that summer. He later traveled to that L.A. gathering to sing the part of Judas, the disciple who betrays Jesus.
“Anna, she had her vision … but she also gave the performers a lot of free space to create our own spin on things,” Beatty said by phone from New York City, where he recently modeled in a show during Fashion Week. “Her storytelling through the music is what really drives me and makes me want to be more connected with God.
“It definitely inspired me.”
The two Brown sisters said they were aware of the amount of talent gathered in the room when they sang their parts in those demos. Rachel, who in “Condemned” sings the part of a woman caught in adultery and brought before Jesus, hoped she could hit a particular high note in the song.
“Everyone in the studio was so good at singing, I was worried I wasn’t going to get it,” Rachel said. “But I did.”
Anna, who appears relaxed and confident in videos as she sings the part of Mary, said at first she was more shy about sharing her songs with others. “It’s been scary and stretching, but I’ve grown a lot,” she said.
She hopes others will grow and stretch, too, as they listen to the songs. She imagines listeners finding a person they relate to in the story, seeing how Jesus interacts with that person, and from that seeing how Jesus would interact with them.
“(It’s) for people to really understand the character of God and his love for people.”
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Several songs from "His Story the Musical" can be heard in videos at HisStorytheMusical.com and on YouTube. When the whole soundtrack premieres on YouTube on April 14, it will also be released as a soundtrack on all digital audio platforms.
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