10 days.
17 songs.
Two of Christian music’s most promising songwriters.
One really creative album.
That’s the simple math behind one giant experiment led by Aodhán King and Benjamin William Hastings. The pair spent years at the same church in Australia, leading worship in the same circles. In 2024, they teamed up for “What A Friend,” which landed on Hastings’ second solo effort, “Sold Out, Sincerely.” The two friends have been wanting to collaborate again for some time.
Although both artists have moved stateside within the last five years, Hastings and King have recently been pursuing solo endeavors on different coasts. King lives in Los Angeles, while Hastings and his family now reside in Nashville. Yet, they didn’t let their geographic locations, nor their busy itineraries, keep them from a greater collaboration.
When they spied a shared opening on their respective calendars, they jumped at the chance to book some time at Gold Pacific Studios, a recording facility in Nashville’s cozy Berry Hill neighborhood where artists like Lauren Daigle, Matt Redman, Charity Gayle and others have previously captured songs.
Coincidentally, King and Hastings’ mutual availability was the only consecutive span of free time available at Gold Pacific for the remainder of the year. With three weeks until go-time, King and Hastings hatched an ambitious plan: They would write and record an album in only 10 days, starting from scratch. Whatever came out — even if it was half-finished songs or rough demos — is what they would release to the public.
The initial idea was partially inspired by a similar test case King participated in with fellow worship leader Abbie Gamboa. Last year, King and Gamboa locked themselves away inside a studio in Gamboa’s native Texas to create an album in a mere six days. Together, the pair made 2025’s 10-track “Throwing Paint,” and the process made King fall in love with the idea of crafting LPs with intentional limitations.
“What I loved about it was just the quickness of it,” King says. “That experience for me, I feel like, brings out the best for me creatively, because I’m a perfectionist; and when you have six days to make an album, your ability to overthink, to edit, just goes out the window.”
Hastings, also a self-described perfectionist, relished the idea of tight parameters. “It almost becomes a time capsule of that moment,” he offers. “When you go to make an album, there’s everything you’ve experienced in that year, or the last couple of years — all of that’s inside you — and you’re babbling everything you’re thinking about God and everything you’ve walked through. And then, when you do it that intensely, you kind of put it into a pressure cooker.”
Knowing their condensed timeline would require more manpower than what the two of them could provide on their own, King and Hastings called in reinforcements. Given that King has penned signature songs stewarded by his former band, Young & Free, like “Sinking Deep,” “This Is Living” and “Highs And Lows,” and Hastings has co-written some of Brandon Lake’s most notable cuts, including “Gratitude” and “Hard Fought Hallelujah,” for which the Irish-born songwriter just won his first GRAMMY®, their collective rolodex is full of Christian music’s best lyricists.
With only a few days’ notice, songwriters like Ben Fielding, Ben Tan, Jonathan Smith, Hank Bentley, Jason Ingram, Cody Carnes, Dylan Thomas and Jonas Myrin received last-minute texts inviting them to the studio to collaborate. Miraculously, dozens of schedules lined up.
“I was looking around the room and thinking, ‘This is crazy,’” Hastings shares of the immense talent they were able to recruit at one time. “I don’t think you could have planned this session if you had six months’ notice, getting all these people together at the same time.”
“We assembled a kind of family, people we’d known forever,” King says. “It was like a reunion in a lot of ways.”
A pivotal moment transpired early on in the recording session when Myrin turned to King and asked what he wanted to achieve with this project. King’s answer was simple: “I don’t know. We’re just waiting to see what God does.”
Quite unexpectedly a mantra for the 10-day experiment was born. King and Hastings began posting cryptic updates across their social platforms with the hashtag #waitingtoseewhatgoddoes and launched a website with the same URL, inviting fans to enter their email address to obtain updates, which offered an unfiltered, behind-the-scenes glimpse into their unique creative process.
The friends fully immersed themselves in the experience, averaging 15-hour days, with a few days even pushing into 19-hour territory. They’d begin around 10 a.m. and often work late into the wee hours of the following morning. Some songs took an hour or two to shape; Others, they slowly chipped away at every single day.
They quickly stumbled upon one key ingredient that fueled the long hours, however: laughter. “I’ve never had so much fun making a record,” Hastings shares. “We laughed the whole time, from start to finish.”
That’s ultimately why King and Hastings decided to name the project “Happy To Be Here.”
Although they wrote and tracked 17 songs during their 10-day sprint, 12 cuts appear on “Happy To Be Here,” which is slated for release on May 29, 2026. Their organic theme of “Waiting To See What God Does” inspired the first song they wrote and prayerful lyrics that give language to surrender: “I’m waiting to see what God does; I’m waiting to see what He does next. I won’t try to control the outcome. At the end of the day, that’s up to Him. Whatever He breathes on, I’m going to lean on. Whatever He has will have my trust. I’m waiting to see what God does.”
While it’s no small feat to create an entire body of work in 10 days, King and Hastings are both quick to confess they aren’t the heroes of this story. Something divine was definitely at work in their midst.
“I don’t think we could have done that week-and-a-half without God at all,” King asserts. “It’s complete faith.”
“It forces you to know you can’t actually do this in your own strength,” Hastings adds. “We could write a handful of songs, but ones that we actually really care about and that are meaningful, that you want people to hear, and that you feel like are actually going to help people and are going to connect with them, that’s the piece you can only do with God.”
The group — and all the featured vocalists — they ended up assembling was also something only God could orchestrate. After writing a song called “Yahweh,” King and Hastings learned Tiffany Hudson (Elevation Worship) was in town on a day off from tour. They texted her at 4 p.m., and within a matter of hours, Hudson was in the vocal booth at Gold Pacific adding her signature warmth to a song she had never heard.
When Carnes helped them reimagine timeless hymn “When I Survey The Wondrous Cross,” he was asked to add his voice to the updated selection, shortened to “Wondrous Cross.” “I think that’s going to be a blessing to the Church in a massive way,” King notes.
Meanwhile, Carnes’ wife, Kari Jobe, appears on regal entry “Holy Jesus.” A day away from handing in the masters, King and Hastings texted Carnes, who, in turn, played the song for his wife. She immediately loved the ballad, but she was sick with a sinus infection at the time. Fortunately, they were able to push their deadline back so Jobe could record guest vocals the following week.
For all the album’s features, the collaborators previewed the project with “Hollow Grave,” a lead single void of a high-profile cameo and overflowing with spirited gang vocals, just ahead of Easter. “Coming into the [studio], I was longing to create church music,” King says, after bowing his solo pop debut, “Beyond Us,” and releasing his collaborative collection with Gamboa. “That’s what I’m passionate about,” he continues. “I want to write songs the church can sing, and ‘Hollow Grave’ felt like a great setup for what this record is. Every song on this album, I’m like, ‘I can’t wait to put that on the setlist and sing this live.’ I haven’t felt that before. I’ve written stuff I love, but I’ve never written with the mindset of, ‘I want to sing this live.’”
The new cuts from “Happy To Be Here” are already living up to the sentiment. Three days after they completed the album, Hastings was leading worship in Albuquerque, New Mexico, and decided to road-test “Hollow Grave” and “Wondrous Cross.” Both anthems immediately resonated with the crowd.
“It feels nice when something that was so intensely ours for a week becomes other people’s songs. That’s kind of the hope,” King asserts. “You want these songs to just go and live their own lives, and you have nothing to do with it. It’s like we raised them in the studio for 10 days, and now we’re sending them out into the world.”
Like children leaving the nest, the songs on “Happy To Be Here” are King and Hastings’ pride and joy. “I think I would be proud of this record if it took us two years to make,” Hastings says.
King quickly interjects, “Yeah, but I think if we tried to take two years on it, it wouldn’t be as good. If we’d have taken the deadline off and just kept working, I think we would have unraveled a lot of things.”
Void of polished precision, the perfectly imperfect “Happy To Be Here” is the record King and Hastings were supposed to make, preserving a moment in time never to be repeated again. Their old process of tinkering, revising and overanalyzing might just be a thing of the past.
After experiencing it for himself, Hastings has bought into King’s new, compressed formula grounded in less scrutiny and more freedom. He says, “I don’t think I ever want to make an album another way.”
