Before "American Idol," before "Gimme the Mike, Utah," there was the Faith Centered Music Association's Refiner's Fire.

This session at the annual FCMA songwriters workshop allows participants to submit a song for review by a panel of judges, who critically assess the various offerings.

In September 2002, Mindy Gledhill attended the workshop and entered a song in the critics' session. It did not fare too badly. After the session, when she went to pick up her tape, however, she couldn't find it. "Kenneth Cope had picked it up. He told me he would like to meet with me. Then Jeff Simpson (president of Excel Entertainment) came up, and he wanted to meet with me."

Cope offered to produce her first CD and be her mentor. For the next year and a half they met weekly, working on her song writing and choosing other songs for a debut CD. "The Sum of All Grace" was released this summer by Lumen Records, a division of Excel. It includes some of the Christian songs she particularly likes such as "River God," by Nicole Nordeman and "I Will Rest in You" by Michelle Tunes and Brent Bourgeois.

And there are five songs that she wrote or co-wrote, including "Keeper of the Faith," "Back To Where You Are" and "A Little More Like Thee." "I wrote 30 songs to get the five we used," she says.

If anyone thinks producing CDs is easy, she jokes, they should know "it's a lot of hard work" — even for someone who has been musical all her life. "I grew up taking piano lessons. And I always loved to sing and wanted to sing. But there was little formal training or discipline."

There were, however, eclectic musical influences, from the marimba, drums and flute she played in the grade-school band as she grew up on the northern California coast, to the Jewish fiddle her fourth-grade teacher played, to the music of American Indian powwows and bluegrass bands, which were popular in the area, to her mom singing classics from the 1920s and '30s. And these, she says, all show up in her music.

When she was 13, the family moved to Spain, where her father served as an LDS mission president. "That was where I began to sing and perform." And that was where she was introduced to another influence. "The Spanish are not timid singers. They praise God when they sing, and I've always wanted to adopt that passion."

Passion was coupled with determination after she returned from Spain. "I made up my mind I would audition for everything I could. Not so much to get in, but to learn to perform in front of people. I had some humbling, embarrassing moments. But I knew if I could get over my stage fright, I could let my heart go."