Ben Shive

Sound The Alarm!

As of about a week ago, you can pre-order my album, The Ill-Tempered Klavier, from The Rabbit Room store.

After over two years of on-again off-again (mostly off-again), my good friend Andrew Peterson, owner and proprietor of The Rabbit Room, has issued me an ultimatum to finally finish this album and release it digitally from his website on June 17th. And so it shall be done. If you pre-order now, you'll help me raise the money to put the finishing touches on the record. You'll also get a digital booklet and two bonus tracks (whatever could they BE?) as my way of saying thank you for your support. If you're, let's say, family, and you'd like to order more than one copy for, let's say, your friends, you can email me and we'll arrange for the record to be delivered to their email account.

Below is a synopsis of the record. You can find this article, as well as more Ill-Tempered news at The Rabbit Room.

This little record of mine is called The Ill-Tempered Klavier. The title is a dumb joke. It’s a play on The Well-Tempered Klavier, a collection of piano pieces by J.S. Bach. Klavier is the German word for piano, and Ill-Tempered has a double meaning. First, it refers to an oddity of piano tuning. You have to temper the tunings of the individual strings on the piano, that is to say you have to tune them just a little sharp or flat, in order to make the whole instrument sound in tune. In that sense, “The Ill-Tempered Klavier” could be paraphrased “the poorly tuned piano.”

But "Ill-Tempered" could also mean that this piano is feeling a little grouchy today. The title track (”Out Of Tune”) is the lament of dilapidated old piano that’s tired of being forgotten. And of course, the curmudgeonly old upright is me. A little out of tune, not always able to keep myself together emotionally. And I think the whole record sounds a little dilapidated but lovable. Or at least I hope it does.

So the songs (in no particular order) are:

New Year — In which I make the resolution not to be a jerk anymore.

She Is The Rising Sun — The moon confesses his true feelings.

The Old Man — “I tell you the truth, unless a kernel of wheat falls to the ground and dies, it remains only a single seed.”

Nothing For The Ache — Try as we might, we can’t stop the bleeding of our hearts. This wound must be there for a reason.

Rise Up — I made the mistake of tuning into hyper-republican talk radio one day. Five minutes later I was praying for the apocalypse.

Out Of Tune — “I’m just a jagged set of keys that unlock old memories. Sentimental melodies, voices echoing, beautiful funeral flowers.”

4th Of July — About something I witnessed at the magnificent Big Bang Boom in Norfolk, NE, where my wife is from.

97 — It hurts to grow up. A song about my senior year of high school.

Do You Remember — The title of a game Beth and I used to play, in which we’d take turns reminiscing about our history.

Wear Your Wedding Dress — Based on a quote from The Mystery Of Marriage: For now is the time to eulogize; now the time to deck with flowers.”

Binary Stars — AP wrote the lyric. It’s about a tragic near-miss.

Thank you for your support. I appreciate all the people who have asked about this record over the years. You’ve kept me going. Not to get ahead of myself, but I’d also like to thank AP, Cason Cooley, Andy Osenga, and Beth, who’ve been enormously helpful and encouraging.

When I Brush Aside This Curtain

A couple of nights ago I was lying on the floor of Ezra’s room, singing my songs. We were both sicker than dogs. I had the flu. He had something that involved throwing up generously into my hands. And for some reason, he would only sleep if I was singing. You might say it was narcissistic for me to have been singing my own songs, but I’d argue that if you’ve ever heard me sing you know it’s disrespectful for me to sing anybody else’s.

January in Nashville is more a matter of deep, abiding depression than bitter cold. A dreary gray curtain descends after Christmas and wraps the poor sun up like a fly in a spider’s web, giving us nothing like a snowfall in return. Then of course all these viruses come uninvited to stay at your house. They don’t eat your food, but neither do you for a while. In fact, you often do sort of the opposite.

Which brings me back to my songs. There I was, lying on the floor, feverish, somehow singing without actually being able to breathe. It was sort of a miracle in that sense, I guess. Lying on the floor on the dark night of the body and soul, I sang:

Do you remember
When the morning fills the sky
How all our darkest dreams surrender
To the coming of the light

And when I brush aside this curtain
Find you shining like the dawn
Beyond the ending of the world
We will go on and on and on

Oh, on and on and on

None of you have ever heard that song, and if you had heard me singing it then, you you would not have thought much of it because not one word was intelligible through my sobs. Don't get me wrong. I'm not much of a crier. It’s only that the promise of all-things-made-new was such a sweet hope to me there in the dark.

The next morning the sun was shining and we all went outside to play in the cool, breezy morning beneath a violent blue sky hung with white clouds like ships sailing to war. Or sailing home. We stood in the driveway like men walking out of jail, back in our old jeans and t-shirts again.

At the time of my last post I was in Sweden. I believe that was spring of last year. When I got back to Nashville, a mess of good work was waiting to ambush me. I spent the summer and fall in a tangle of more work than one man can do. I learned how to stay up until 3 AM working working on record number 2, then wake up at seven to be a dad for a while (if a whiny one), go to work at 10, work on record number 1 until dinner, come home and be a dad again, watch some Gilmore Girls with the wife just to feel human, start working on record number 2 again around 9 or 10 PM, etc. Lather, rinse, repeat. It’s not good for the soul, but sometimes it’s just the facts ma’am.

Irony of ironies; though this blog went the way of the pogo ball for a while, I actually accomplished more on my record (the much-interrupted the Ill-Tempered Klavier) during this time than I had in over a year, owing to a not-interesting-enough-to-blog-about turn of events. Over the course of two recording sessions, I was able to record all the strings for the album with the illustrious David Davidson and the Love Sponge Strings (see the Captains Courageous blog at blogspot). And this for almost nothing! But then the spell was broken, the old Klavier was put back on das Regal, and I was back working nights. And days.

Fall came and went. Then of course it was time for good old AP’s yearly Behold The Lamb Of God Tour, which is always a bit of a sabbath for me, if not for my dear wife. But she got her sabbath eventually, first in the form of Christmas with our families and then in the form of a trip to Orlando, where we were treated ridiculously well by the good people of Young Life, whose all-staff conference I was playing piano at.

Upon returning to Nashville, I started work on three records: one for a girl named Melanie Penn, a New Yorker whose voice and writing are marvelous; another for Allen Levi, beloved bard of Young Life fame and a true southern gentleman; and my own. Cason and I are working for the next two weeks together hoping to finish the record in that time. I have to tell you that I love it. It makes me smile to be working on it again and I can’t wait to share it with you. After all this time, to be reunited with these songs feels as if the stage hands have raised the dull gray curtain at last and sent the sun spinning once again across the old familiar sky.

In Fond Memory

I’m in Sweden at the moment, up late from the jet lag, remembering an old friend. Bob Borgstede was in almost every class with me from kindergarten up. He turned out to be a fine guitarist, of the jazz variety, and I would say we sort of experienced a musical renaissance together. Bob passed away suddenly, not long ago. His wife, Sarah, asked his friends to post their memories of Bob to his website. Below is my submission. I post it here in his honor and because I think you might relate.

First of all let me say how sorry I am about all this and how bittersweet it’s been for me to read through the program for Bob’s funeral and to see the pictures at the website, especially those of Bobby (Bob’s son). He’s a beautiful kid. It was also good to read Sarah’s letter and I’d like her to know that my family and I will be praying for her and for Bobby

Is it a coincidence that I had already been thinking about my fondest memory of Bob a week or so before his death? I was mowing my lawn and thinking how my life has changed profoundly over the course of my twenties and how I’m just now starting to appreciate the gravity of it all. I’m up to my ears in responsibilities these days, and along with these responsibilities, new joys are springing up around me. Deeper joys and more profound ones. The whole deal can be pretty overwhelming at times. So, as I mowed, I thought back to my junior year in high school when Bob and I, along with our friends, David Hedrick and Alicia DiZerega (whose name I have certainly misspelled here) were in an advanced biology class and were given the assignment of making a movie about pumpkins (but not really about pumpkins). This assignment was famous at Fort Zumwalt South and people really went all-out for it. So Bob and I and the rest of the group spent our Saturdays putting together this ridiculous film which I won’t try to describe. Suffice it to say it is a cinematic masterpiece. It is also the centerpiece of my fond high school memories. At the time we were making our movie, the Beatles had just released the song, “Free As A Bird” along with the Beatles Anthology TV series. Bob and I loved it, so the final sequence of our movie is a music video of it. For the duration of the song (and it’s a long one), David, Alicia, Bob, and I run through the city park with our arms outstretched as if we are flying in no particular formation, completely free. There we are in my memory, running along the bike trails, weaving back and forth, stopping for a moment to swing, jumping out of our swings, running again, finally collapsing in the soft grass. With no idea what’s coming. This has become for me a picture of my youth. It was a time when my friends meant the world to me. Together we were fairly aimless and totally unfettered. Free. It was beautiful and it makes me a little sad to think of it even now, though I wouldn’t go back if I could. I hope Bob remembers it just as I do.

With love and my sincerest condolences, Ben Shive

My Own Reflection

I am riding in a shuttle bus from the small town of Mikolajki (pronounced “Mike Wazowski”) back to Warsaw. I have been living in a vaccuum for a week, singing worship songs for missionaries at a resort hotel in the middle of nowhere. And now here I am, bouncing down the hilly back-country of Poland with those trademark iPod headphones in my ears. The Weepies are emoting softly, secretly to me. They sing, “Back and forth we ply these oars, they move in time and get entwined.” I couldn’t be enjoying this moment more purely. Then I notice myself moving with the beat, mouthing the words. I notice myself.

This is always a problem for me.

And now I wonder if I am enjoying myself too much, too publicly. Are my traveling companions watching me? If so, should I take it easy (the angel on my left shoulder) or ham it up and give them something to watch (the devil on my right)? As I think on these things, I am still watching the fields and fences roll by. Suddenly, the sun breaks through the clouds and I can see in my glasses the reflection of my own eye, huge, starting me down pointe blank.

Annie Dillard, in her book, “An American Childhood,” writes of her own awakening to self: “For as long as I could remember, I had been transparent to myself, unselfconscious, learning, doing, most of every day. Now I was in my own way; I myself was a dark object I could not ignore. I couldn’t remember how to forget myself. I didn’t want to think about myself, to reckon myself in, to deal with myself every livelong minute on top of everything else–-but swerve as I might, I couldn’t avoid it. I was a boulder blocking my own path. I was a dog barking between my own ears, a barking dog who wouldn’t hush. So this was adolescence. Is this how the people around me had died on their feet—inevitably, helplessly? Perhaps their own selves eclipsed the sun for so many years the world shriveled around them, and when at last their inescapable orbits had passed through these dark egoistic years it was too late, they had adjusted.”

My pastor recently listed the opressive self, with its tawdry obessions and nagging feelings of awkwardness, among the heavy things we will shed when we die. I, for one, will be relieved to escape the close reflection of my own eye.

2nd Person

At the haircut place for little girls, there’s a walled-off area for us boys, like the sick-kid corral at the doctor’s office. There, Jude and I found two TV sets, and we sat down in front of them to assess the situation. One TV was hooked up to an educational video game, the kind that could only have been developed by concerned mommies with masters degrees in a board room in southern California. On the other TV was a 2nd-person-shooter; probably Halo, I’m not sure. Now, kids discern these things intuitively and so Jude knew, without any help from me, what was what and who was who. It was a foregone conclusion.

So there I was, playing Halo at Sweet and Sassy with my three-year-old.

The game was already set up as a split-screen, two-player thing, so I figured we’d go ahead and shoot-em-up family style. Now, let me disclaim for a moment. This was the last thing I wanted to do. I could see before me, first of all, my wife’s swift and righteous judgement, and then, somewhere further down the road, news headlines, all of them referring to Jude simply as “the gunman.” But put yourself in my place. Is there a man among you who would give his son a stone when he asks for bread? I had to think on my feet. Then it came to me. I could make the game something else! Something innocuous. Jude didn’t know any better. We could go exploring. And that’s just what we did. Jude was already working that complicated X-Box deal like the Last Starfighter so I came and found him and we set off on our little excursion. It was a pretty place after all. We walked under the waterfall, then down to the cliffs. Then I saw dead bodies on the ground and out of nowhere somebody opened fire on me. Jude was still perfectly safe and oblivious. I kept saying things like “Ooh, look at the flowers!” as I returned fire. But it was no use. They mowed me squarely down. The replay, and yes, there was a replay, was so bloody I actually heard a voice from the educational game next door say, “Come on, let’s go play somewhere else.” By the mercies of God, Jude didn’t see any of this and the game restarted right when I died. So we found ourselves, moments later, walking together on a wide, grassy plain. “Further up and further in,” I said.

This all unfolded to me like a fable. Life is a bloody game after all and it really is horrifying to see your own children let loose in the middle of it. It’s just like that movie, “Life Is Beautiful.” Sometimes the best you can do in the middle of the concentration camp, in the pit of Hell on Earth, is to change the rules of the game. You can love, after all. You can live for others. There’s beauty all around us, even in the darkest places. You can think about it, write about it. You can pray. Even on the slopes of Mount Doom, you can try and remember the Shire in springtime. And if worse comes to worse and the bullets start flying, maybe you can draw a little enemy fire to buy your loved ones some time before those allied tanks roll in and take us to that far, green country.