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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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Happy new year, everyone. I hope you’re doing well. I’m still up to my ears at home and at work, and am thus not much of a blogger, nor am I much of a Frogger, nor am I much closer to finishing my record. I suppose you have enough blogs to read already, and enough records to buy. But if anyone’s still frequenting my site or subscribing to the feed, I have a little present for you in lieu of a record. It’s a present that you have to pay for, I’m sorry to say. I just created an imix of some of the songs I most enjoyed this year. You can search for “Ben’s 2006 Picks” in the imixes section of the iTunes music store. The songs are in no particular order. Some are old and some are new. I don’t know if any of them are legitimate or important, but that’s not what this is about. Rather, if we could have each of you over to eat pizza on the picnic table in our back yard, I’d bring the little boom-box out of the bedroom and plug it in by the back door and this is the music I would play. I hope you like it.

Warm regards, Ben

p.s. I think it’s rated E for everyone, with the exception of one of the Imogen Heap songs (Hide And Seek), which has the word “Hell” in it.

My Fellow Americans,

I think an update is in order. The last time we touched the record was probably three months ago and since then, Cason and I have both been up to our ears (in whatever you’d like to imagine us up to our ears in: corn casserole, bowling pins). We just had a pow-wow in which we resolved that if Cason doesn’t have anything open up this fall, we’ll finish the record on Andrew Peterson’s Christmas tour. I’d like to get to it sooner, but I’m pretty excited about the road-record idea. Bus tours are decidedly sit-aroundish, and I’ll be relieved to have something to do. So that would land the release date sometime in the early spring. Thanks to everyone who has asked. I’m thrilled about what we have so far and I think we’ve only just begun…to LIIIIIVE. You can listen to some of the songs at my myspace page. ‘Til then, be well.

A kiss for luck and we’re on our way,

Ben

Yesterday, August bid us a lovely farewell like an evil teacher writing something complimentary in your yearbook. Something nice to remember her by.

It was my daughter’s second birthday and, though it was a cool morning, we went swimming at the Y to celebrate. After we swam, as we got dressed and packed our bags on the long, vinyl chairs, Jesus spoke to me in a parable.

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Sorry we’ve been out of commission here for a while. I don’t really understand how the internet works, but I imagine some gerbil somewhere stopped running. Those crazy gerbils.

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“Faith is standing in the darkness, and a hand is there, and we take it.”

-Frederick Buecher, The Magnificent Defeat

The man praying was known to be very spiritual. I am usually suspicious of such people, which really means that I am jealous of them. But I could tell he was really talking to God and I liked the sound it made. He prayed for the evening and for the band. He was getting worked-up and so was everybody else, except for me, of course. I don’t expect to get excited these days, it’s been so long. Still, I was listening as best I could in-between my inevitable self-conscious thoughts. He paced the room as he spoke, touching each of my friends for a moment, a blessing and a sign of brotherhood. I closed my eyes, dreading the awkward, intentional feeling of a stranger’s hand on me. His voiced swelled and broke as he spoke of the presence that would fill the room that night, which I was sure I would not feel. And, not for the first time in my life, I started to think that there is something really wrong with me, started to wonder what I’d done. Now he drew his blessing to a close. I heard him stop beside the last of my friends for a moment and then leave our circle. It was only right, I thought, that I should be forgotten, like Esau asking, “Is there no blessing left for me?” But then he came to me and I felt the weight on my back, like a warm wind, like Beuchner’s “hand in the dark.” My heart reached out and took it.

This week I wrote a string arrangement. Let me tell you how that goes down. And let me preface this by saying that I’m writing as though you were my sister-in-law (who you would really like), not somebody who reads Electronic Musician. So don’t think I’m talking down to you.

I got a call a week or so ago from an old Belmont friend, Josh Deane. He’s formed some kind of working relationship with an artist named Jeff Deyo. Jeff is giving Josh a shot at producing a couple of songs as a sort of audition to produce his next record.

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I’m typing this with a hospital bracelet around my wrist. My wife is talking on the phone and our new little boy is asleep on the bed beside her. He is only 26 hours old and I am only 26 years old. Mindy Smith is singing through the little speakers on my laptop. She sings “you’re just a growing beautiful someone.” She sings this for us, kept here blessedly in room 21.

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I had some time off in a hotel in Denver this weekend and I got to do a little writing. I’ve accumulated a lot of ideas for new songs but I have next to nothing written on any of them. So I sat down in this hotel bar to give some ink to one of my ideas.

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I just posted some in-progress songs from The Ill-Tempered Klavier on my myspace page. Specifically, I posted “New Year” and “The Old Man.” By “in-progress,” I mean that there are still many bells and at least a few whistles to be added to each song, and both are far from mixed. But still, I’m excited for you to hear them. You can download them, too, by the way.

Benny hopey you likey.

Does food want to be eaten? Let’s personify food for a moment. I’m at a nice restaurant. I’m famished, just about to dig in, when suddenly my plate starts talking to me. Muppet-like. What does he say? Is plate-of-food trying to entice me or is he blubbering about his wife and kids?

I’ve been troubled by this for many moons. I’d love your input on the matter. Email your thoughts to plateoffood@benshive.com.