Now that the new album is done and turned in for manufacturing, Max shares a bit about making our most diverse record ever, Reinvention, and why we decided to go back and reinvent some of our favorite songs.

We hit our deadline, so I had to stop reinventing and hand over this record for Reid to mix. DaVinci said “you never finish art, it is only abandoned” and in my case, I’m never finished - I just hit a deadline and I try to get my children as dressed and ready as possible for the big wide world before I shove them out the door. Sadly, sometimes the weaker ones get a quick comb through the hair and a t-shirt before they are shoved out so we can spend more time on the stronger siblings, hoping that the best songs will carry the whole family. When I decide to take a song from its embryonic demo state, usually just one verse and chorus in rough form, all the way to its mixed and mastered term, it’s because I have developed a vision for how I hope it will turn out. It never turns out as well as I can hear it my head, but hopefully it turns out ok. The ones that I agonize over are the ones that fall short of that dream. When the deadline hits, it’s like what NASA did with the moon mission: abandon in place. The project is left on the moon, frozen forever in that state. You wonder if the song was ever any good, but more hauntingly, you wonder if you were just one small change away from it all coming together…

Continue reading the rest of Max’s thoughts about going ‘back to the moon’ for Reinvention at Maxwax11.com

We’ve been keeping the track names for our new album Reinvention kind of secret over the past few months… but now that the record is done and back from mastering, we thought we’d share the official song titles and sequence with you here first before anyone else gets it!

1. Cross The Line (Box Office Blockbuster Mix)
2. Rock What You Got (Fight Underdog Fight! Mix)
3. Let It Roll - Matt Dally with Superchick << NEW SONG!!
4. Karaoke Superstars (Shiny Car Advert Mix) - Superchick with Thumpmonks
5. Hey Hey (Vampires vs. Cheerleaders Mix)
6. One and Lonely (Chick Flick Mix)
7. Breathe (Don’t You Die On Me Mix)
8. Bowling Ball (Not That Into You Mix)
9. Pure (Brand New Day Mix)
10. Wishes (Teens Falling In/Out Of Love Mix)
11. Still Here << NEW SONG!!
12. With You - Tricia Brock << NEW SONG!!

We’ll post some audio clips over the coming weeks…. Look for info on how you can pre-order Reinvention coming soon!

If you’re a fan of the ABC Family show Make It Or Break It, you’ll want to be listening for two Superchick songs airing on the new episode this Monday, March 8!

“Hey Hey” and “Alive” will play during the episode… you can buy the songs on iTunes here!

The show airs at 9/8 CST. Let us know if you catch it! For more info on Make It Or Break It, visit ABCFamily.go.com

Lots of you have been asking where you can get accompaniment tracks for some of your favorite Superchick songs so you can perform them at school, church, talent shows, etc.

Well, now you can get performance tracks for four popular Superchick songs at iTunes! Click the links below to download them now. Each EP contains the original recording, plus a performance track in 3 keys.

WE LIVE - Premiere Performance Plus Track EP

STAND IN THE RAIN (SYMPHONIC MIX) - Premiere Performance Plus Track EP

PURE - Premiere Performance Plus Track EP

CRAWL (CARRY ME THROUGH) - Premiere Performance Plus Track EP

Hopefully soon we will also have sheet music available for many of the songs you’ve been requesting!

(Official Press Release) Sisters Tricia Baumhardt and Melissa Brock of Superchick share some love with their Compassion International sponsored children in Uganda January 18-29, 2010. The two visited four Compassion Child Development Centers in the southern Kampala area, including Nakulabye, Naguru, Kikonda Village, and Kigungu Fish Landing Site. There they saw and experienced the full range of holistic development taking place with children of all ages from before birth through college graduation.

Melissa comments, “Going to Uganda with Compassion really let me see in person how sponsoring a child not only gives them food, water, education and God’s love, but it gives hope to the hopeless. It gives them a chance at a future beyond their circumstances. And the people of Uganda showed me what true love for God is in the midst of trials. They were full of joy for their God, and it was evident in their faces. I left with a new joy myself. What a beautiful place, a beautiful people and a beautiful God we have!”

For more information about Superchick’s involvement with Compassion International, click here.

This week, to support National Eating Disorders Awareness Week, we are giving away a free download of our song “Courage.”

Click here to download the song, no strings attached.

This song is an extremely personal song for me. I want to share with you the story behind the song, which is about my own struggle with an eating disorder. I hope that it reaches someone out there who has been or is where I’ve been, that it will encourage those of you who may be struggling with a similar problem. You’re not alone… and there is hope.

Where do you start when you’re about to be vulnerable with people you have and may never meet? I guess at the beginning…

I think I was 12 when I first started feeling the affects of “pretty pressure,” as I like to call it. My best friend was 2 years older than me and she was tall and athletic and pretty and boys liked her and and and… And that was the first time I remember realizing I was short and kinda chubby and that my daddy thinking I was pretty just wasn’t enough anymore.

And that’s pretty much the story from ages 12-15. Those awkward, hard years of realizing boys exist (even though I kinda always liked boys:)) and going through lots of changes and feeling pressure from so many things: friends, magazines (Bop, Teen Beat), TV, shopping malls with ads of people that were perfect on the walls… There were so many things all around that all added up to me being short and kinda chubby.

There was a defining moment though where it went from just feeling not good enough to doing something about it:

There was a boy… and I liked this boy a lot. He was cute and tall and had curly hair and a great smile that would make me forget what I was thinking or doing if he looked my way. I wanted this boy to like me. I would think of things to say if I ever got the chance to talk to him. I planned my outfits every morning with him in mind.

One day I saw him walking towards me and I thought, “Oh this is it. Here he comes and we are gonna talk and it is gonna be magical!” He came up to me and we chit-chatted for a little bit… And then he looked at me as if he was gonna say something important, you know with the head tilted to one side, blue eyes sparkling, so tall I would have had to stand on my tip toes if he ever kissed me. I had every bit of me alert to the beautiful words I anticipated coming out of his mouth.

“Melissa,” he said.

“Yes?” I replied, with many excited head nods.

“You know, you kind of have chubby ankles,” he said, ever so casually.

And that’s the moment that all the years of feeling a little bit ugly and chubby came to their final pinnacle and then crashed down on me and buried me. That’s the moment I knew I would do anything to never feel that again. That’s the moment I decided to do whatever it takes to not be that girl anymore. That’s the moment I became an anorexic.

I didn’t completely stop eating right away because that would be too obvious. I started with little things, like excuses that I didn’t feel well, so that meal got skipped. Then there was the ‘oh I ate already’ - another meal skipped. The ‘I’m gonna eat as soon as I get home’ - meal skipped. And the ‘when I eat in the morning it makes my stomach upset’ - no meal. ‘I’m going out with friends and we are gonna eat at the mall’ - zero meal.

It became lots of little lies every day until I got so good at it that eventually I had enough lies that I could skip whole days of eating… which became weeks… and then became months. The part that really fueled the fire was that I was losing weight and people were telling me that I looked good. So I thought “why in the world stop?” I was finally getting skinny like I always wanted to be and people seemed to like it. It was a sealed deal as far as I was concerned.

After awhile I actually had said that I didn’t feel well so many times that the thought of food actually did make me feel sick. It was awesome…for awhile. Until people stopped telling me that I looked good and started looking at me funny. Until my grandpa one day said to me that it looked like someone had deflated my chest. Until I started feeling ugly again and the same feelings of just not being happy with myself slowly crept back in.

After about 3 months of pretty much not eating, I started looking for something to make me feel happy and pretty again. It just so happened that my best friend had been away at a clinic for eating disorders and when she got home she started telling me things that she learned there. The most important thing she ever told me one day still rings in my head whenever I feel not quite good enough: God created you uniquely and specifically for a reason and a purpose and He thinks you are a beautiful creation.

Now I’m not here to tell you that the moment she said those words to me I believed them and was miraculously transformed. But those words did start something inside of me. Kind of like a little (very little) seed of truth and hope were planted and the more I started to want my life to change and the more I talked to my friend about it, the more it would grow.

I honestly don’t remember exactly how long it took but I do remember the moment I believed it for the first time. I was standing in the bathroom looking in the mirror. At first I was just looking at myself, doing the usual dissecting and scrutinizing every inch and criticizing myself…. and then those words about God knitting me in my mother’s womb came to me as if someone was audibly saying it out loud to me at that moment.

I tried to ignore it, but then again I heard, “I made you exactly the way I wanted you to be - a beautiful creation. You are beautiful!”

God was telling me something in that moment that I will never forget, and when I looked up into the mirror this time it was not with my eyes - I saw myself for the first time the way God looks down on me. The same way He looked down on me the day that I was born and said, “What a beautiful creation!”

And it’s not just about a worldly beauty that changes and fades, but a Godly kind of beauty. The kind of beauty that we see when we look at the mountains and the ocean, the sky, flowers, birds, rainbows and all the other things that God created and that we stop and say, “Wow, that is so beautiful.” The God that created those things created me. I am beautiful… a beauty that cannot be taken away from me because it was created in me before I was even one day old.

I broke that day. I cried and cried and cried, but not because I felt ugly or unaccepted. I cried because for the first time, I felt truly and wholeheartedly loved with no strings attached just the way that I am.

I’m not gonna sit here and say that after that it was easy going. It did get better - way better - for a long time. And then about the third year I was in Superchick I somehow forgot about that beauty that I’d found that day so many years before. I started feeling inadequate and like I needed to be a certain shape and size for people to love me. So I stopped eating again. It wasn’t as easy this time though, because I had people in my life that knew the lies I would try to use. I did give into the anorexia again for a bit, but this time it was harder.

I believe that’s because once you know the truth, you can’t hide from it for very long. You can ignore it for awhile and keep yourself busy and try to push it away, but when everything stops - and there will always be a moment when it does and you are all alone confronted with what you are doing to yourself - the truth will start to whisper in your ear.

And for me God whispered once again, “You are my beautiful creation, Melissa.” I couldn’t ignore it. So I clung to it like water and air. I made it my mantra every morning when I would wake up. I would look in the mirror and say, “What am I gonna believe today? Lies or the truth? Am I going to be courageous? Am I going to choose real beauty or fake?”

And that’s what I have done every day since then.

It’s not always about a one time choice. Sometimes that’s too big or too hard to handle or grasp or deal with. So we make it one day at a time. And some days (I’m gonna be completely honest here), I choose the lie. But the beauty of life is that the next day, or even the next minute sometimes, I can choose the truth.

My name is Melissa. I have struggled with anorexia since I was 15 years old. Today I beat it and choose the truth. I am beautiful. I am loved. I am me.

Download “Courage” this week for free by clicking here. Please feel free to share this link with friends who may also need to hear the song this week during National Eating Disorders Awareness Week.

There are so many people out there who are struggling with self-image issues and eating disorders. Sometimes, all it can take to help someone is an unexpected compliment to remind them that they are beautiful! Join the OperationBeautiful.com movement and help change someone’s perception of themselves today… because we all need a reminder sometimes that we are each uniquely and wonderfully so beautiful!

Download “So Beautiful” on iTunes

Next week is National Eating Disorders Awareness Week and some of you who know me better know that this hits close to home for me.

I know full-well the pressures that society and even friends sometimes place on us to be thin and beautiful. It started for me when I was 15. I know what it’s like to not feel pretty, to feel fat, to feel like no one would ever want to be with you or even be friends with you because you feel so bad about yourself.

BUT I also know how it feels to be free from those pressures and feel a love and acceptance that isn’t humanly possible. Next week I am going to share my story, the whole story. And I hope that it reaches someone out there who has been or is where I have been. The biggest step is knowing you aren’t alone.

And I am telling you, yes you who is reading this right now and thinking about not eating today, YOU ARE NOT ALONE… because I understand. I am there with you and someone so much bigger is there as well.

Our new album REINVENTION releases 04.20.2010… we’ll announce the track listing soon, but look for reinvented versions of some of our favorite songs from every album in the Superchick discography, plus some brand new tracks too!

February 21-27 is National Eating Disorders Awareness Week, and Operation Beautiful is one of the featured organizations for the week.

Many of you are familiar with Superchick’s song “Courage” (from the Beauty From Pain album), which is a song about Melissa’s own struggle with an eating disorder: “I think the most powerful way to tell a story is to be completely vulnerable and honest about ourselves,” Melissa explains. “This song isn’t preaching a message. It’s a true story. I pray people will be touched by it and will be willing to see where they hide their struggles, their pain and then have courage to tell someone. They need people they can let into that secret life and love them through it. We aren’t meant to make it through life alone. None of us have it all together.”

Operation Beautiful is collecting stories about how positive self-talk and Operation Beautiful post-it notes have helped girls, women and men recover from their eating disorder. These stories will be included on OperationBeautiful.com during NEDA Week. If you have a story (one paragraph or so) to share, please email it to Operation Beautiful. Include your name (or state you want it to be anonymous), age, location and blog address.

Listen to Superchick’s song “Courage” below… and remember… you are SO BEAUTIFUL!