Nigel Cuff did an awesome job with the demo for this song.  His contact info is at the end of this blog entry.

The story behind What Matter’s Most is really pretty simple.  San Diego has been through two major fire scares over the past 6 years or so.  This song was written after the first one.  While my family and I were evacuated the last fire, we were not during the first one. 

Right after the first major fire our church got involved in the community outreach program helping people clean up.  The first time we went out, we were taken to a trailer park which had been destroyed.  We were sifting throuh the ash with the owners trying to find anything that had survived.  In some cases it would just be a coffee cup or something small.  In other cases, the fire had created a bit of art by melting various objects together.  What struck me the  most is that we were trying to help out people who had lost everything and they seemed to be doing better than we were.  They were cheerful and over and over the story was "my family and I surived, that is what was important". 

But there was a loss of life in that firestorm and while the early part of the song says that we survived and that is important, it is also worth noting that no one gets out of THIS life alive and the important thing is to survive the eternal fire by being in heaven.

I think the line about if God would ask those that had died what they thought was inspired by Billy Graham’s comments at the 9-11 memorial service when he said that it was sad that so many people had lost their lives, but that they were in a better place and given the choice of Heaven with Jesus and coming back to earth, they would gladly stay in Heaven.

Hope you liked the song. 
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Words and Music (c) 2004 William J. Crowe Jr
Demo and vocals by Nigel Cuff. Check him out at http://www.nigelcuffmusic.com/demopage.htm