Ben Shive: As we do that, always keeping an eye on the ball of, “Hey, we’re not trying to be cute here.” The point isn’t just to say, “Look what we did here,” the point is, so that people can sing.
David Zimmer: Welcome to Sound Plus Doctrine, the podcast of Sovereign Grace Music where we explore what the Bible has to say about music and worship in the church and encourage those who plan, lead, and participate in their Sunday gatherings each week.
DZ: Hello and welcome to the Sound Plus Doctrine Podcast. My name is David Zimmer.
Bob Kauflin: My name’s Bob Kauflin.
DZ: And we have a very special guest for the first time ever over Zoom…
BK: Yeah we had to pay him so much money to get here…
[laughter]
DZ: Mr. Ben Shive.
BK: Just kidding.
BS: Just kidding, I’m Mr. Ben Shive?
BK: Nah just kidding that we’re giving you a lot of money.
DZ: It is great to have you with us Ben. Thank you for joining us.
BS: Great to be had. Always love seeing you guys…
BK: Ben is a great friend and really a recent friend. You’ve done so much, and helped so many people, and I think people probably would be most aware of just your relationship with Andrew Peterson. And produced all of his albums? Most of his albums?
BS: Not all.
BK: Some?
BS: Yeah I guess at this point, it’s most.
BK: Okay, great. Yeah, just a huge fan of that. And a writer as well. But recently, I think last year, helped us with the Unchanging God Volumes, which we loved.
BS: And we’re singing some of those songs in my church now…
BK: Oh, amazing! That is amazing.
DZ: So great.
BK: And then we recorded four singles at the WorshipGod conference, and Ben you blessed us with your organ playing, synth playing. So, just so grateful for how you are seeking to use your gifts to serve the church.
DZ: Mmhm.
BK: Huge.
BS: Thank you.
DZ: Yeah.
BK: Huge thing that you’re doing.
BS: I’m a fortunate man.
DZ: Well, and we want people to get to know you and to see kinda what you’re a part of and how you are serving the church, so let’s kick it off.
BK: Dive in!
DZ: The first question we have for you, Ben, is to tell us how you came to know the Lord.
BS: Sure, yeah. You know, it’s funny that you ask that at this moment because I just had an experience that helped me think of my story a little differently. So I’ll tell you my story, my story is, I remember my mom pushing us around the neighborhood in a wagon and learning a memory verse for every letter of the alphabet as like a…
BK: Wow.
BS: you know, four year old, and you know, those little snippity verses “All have sinned” A. B, you know and that’s…
DZ: Wow.
BK: J, “Jesus wept”.
BS: But yeah… [chuckle] “Jesus wept” yeah. So that’s the kind of house I grew up in, parents who were both believers, and I think when I was four years old, I was sitting at the dinner table and I was like, “Uh hey, can I go to my room for a second?” I went to my room and I prayed that God would come into my heart, and then I went back to the table and I didn’t tell anybody. It was just kind of…
BK: [chuckle]
BS: And I think that just kind of illustrates how sort of like, this is the world. It’s like eating or whatever, to me, that’s what the life of faith was, was always just kind of… It was part of the fabric. And so I think then I was a bit of a free agent for a while there. [laughter] There was a sense of just kinda like, whoever will give me attention has my loyalty. Or whoever will laugh at my jokes or whatever. So it really, I think there was kind of a… I was involved in my church and I was memorizing verses in Awana and whatever. I guess, maybe this is just how I’ve come to interpret in the intervening years, but I think a big moment for me was the moment that I sat in front of my dad’s 486 PC computer in probably 1995…
BK: Wow.
BS: and I was playing Minesweeper or Hearts… I had borrowed Rich Mullins’ “A Liturgy, a Legacy, & a Ragamuffin Band” from my youth pastor, ’cause I like the title and I liked the cover, and I loaded the DISC into the tray and pushed it in, and “Here in America” was sung. And I went, “the Holy King of Israel loves me here, in America.”
DZ: [chuckle]
BS: Like I just… I knew it was true. And I think that from there, Rich Mullins music just kinda went like, “Here’s God, here’s his gospel. Isn’t that beautiful?” And that was when I really started to see the beauty in a new way and recognize in a new way, like I could be a part of this beauty, the Holy King of Israel loves me here, in America, in 1995. So, I mean really the remainder of his life was short, he had two years left on the planet, but during those two years, he was kind of my guide. And so that actually… Not only is that, maybe the story. Oh, what I wanted to say about it was that a couple weeks ago, ya know I’ve got grown, well, they’re almost grown kids now, and so I’m starting to feel some of the holy terror of, they’re gonna go into the world and my influence over them is diminishing day by day, and there are fears that come with that, and I was listening to a guitar player from Nashville, named Dave Cleveland tell his story. And it was… So I was on a panel and there were two guys in front of me, and they told his story, and it’s his story to tell, I guess, so I probably won’t tell it, but basically it was a guy going this way, so fast away from God, and then God just goes “[clunk] and you’re mine”…
BK: Mmmm, yep,
BS: That was kind of how it went…
BK: He can do that.
BS: And then the next guy in line was a bass player named Danny O’Lannerghty… And he told his story, same story. And then when I told my story, it helped me, having gone after those guys, helped me to see in a new way that my story’s the same. Even though, at that point, God did … maybe the difference would be that there was already a trajectory that had to do with God’s kingdom, but there was still this sense of just like… And God reached in and he grabbed me and he said, “You are mine”… I remember when I was maybe in my late twenties asking my mom, “were you ever worried about me and Josh and like were you ever worried about if I was doing stuff that you didn’t know about or whatever”, and she was like, “I always just prayed that you would know that you belong to God”. And when she said that, I was like, “Whoa”…
[laughter]
BS: I think I always knew that I belonged to God…
DZ: Yeah, wow.
BS: So he must’ve answered her prayer. Anyway, that’s kinda my story.
BK: It is always Biblical, when we give the credit for our salvation to God…
BS: Yeah, yeah.
BK: You know he’s, no matter what we thought beforehand coming into it, it is God who reaches into our dead souls and raises them to life, he doesn’t reach into it, he raises our dead souls to life… You were dead in your sins, and trespasses, sinful nature. That’s so great. Okay so,
DZ: That’s awesome.
BK: We could sit and talk about this stuff all day, but today is really on arranging, we wanna talk about arranging in the church…
BS: Yeah, let’s do it.
BK: Talk about your history of playing for the church, like playing, what church are you at now?
BS: That’s great, that’s a great window and talking about arranging because I was… I think… As a young piano player, I was the kind of player that I would have a lot to say to now.
[laughter]
BK: Oh! I can relate to that!
BS: One of my early memories of realizing that there was something there, that maybe I had a gift, was I was playing piano in the band at my summer camp. I say it was band, but it was me and an older guy was playing guitar and he was kind of the hero, and we were playing the song “Give Thanks” from the 70’s…
BK: [sings] “Give thanks with a grateful heart”…
BS: Wait, did you write that or something? Yeah yeah! Who wrote that?
DZ: No idea.
BK: Henry?… Oh, I do, I know, but I can’t remember,
BS: So I started playing and we were kinda doing a bit of a groove, and I was playing some little [vocalization] on piano, and I could feel that there was some kind of electricity and that it was like… I was in the flow. Also like, I know for a fact I was playing, just over playing, in the most heinous way, like looking back on it. So yeah, I was definitely a kid who had some… A little bit of facility on my instrument, I had some chops because I had studied jazz, and it took me a little while to find out that that was something I was gonna have to overcome as much as someone else would have had to overcome their lack of facility…
DZ: Well, and the fact that you were learning that in the church, is… That’s such a cool testament to the people you’re playing with.
BS: Yeah.
DZ: Yeah.
BS: Yeah.
BK: So how did you grow? What did you see through the years?
BS: Well, you know, a lot of my growth didn’t happen in the church, because straight out of college, I had a road gig, and so I didn’t do… And still don’t do, a whole lot of playing at my church…
BK: Okay.
BS: Probably ’cause I play all week. And then also, I teach Sunday school on Sunday mornings…
BK: Oh fantastic!
BS: So I kind of teach high school Sunday school, so it’s hard for me to serve on the worship team…
BK: And what church are you at?
BS: I go to a church called Grace Community Church in Nashville. So a lot of my lessons were in the studio, and one of the early ones is I was on the road with Andrew, and I was, you know, six months out of college, and we were in Indianapolis or some place. And this guy goes, “Hey, I’ve got a little home studio, I’m working on a record, I was wondering if on your day off tomorrow, you could come by my studio and play piano on a track?” I was like, “I’d love to do that”. And part of the reason I wanted to do it was so that Andrew could see me show off in the studio…
DZ: [chuckle]
BK: Perfect.
BS: Because I hadn’t played on a record for him yet, I was just like fresh on that gig, and so he came along and he heard me play on that song, and on the way home, he was like, “Hey… So Ben you kinda did a lot like kinda all the time on that song”…
[laughter]
BS: And he told me that his anecdote was that, Matt Rollings, who is a giant on the piano, Matt, he’s in Lyle Lovett’s Large Band, or he was…
DZ: Oh wow.
BS: He may not be anymore. So he’s Texas swing guy and jazz guy, like he’s got all the chops, all day… More than I’ve ever had in my life, or could ever hope to have. And he played on Andrew’s first two records. And on one of the songs, Andrew said they asked Matt to play a solo in the outro, like to do something, and so they rolled the outro at him and a bar went by, two bars went by, four bars went by, and he still hadn’t done anything. And they were like, “Did he know what we were rolling him for?” And then he went [da da da]. That was it.
[laughter]
BS: That was his solo… And they were like…
BK: You’re killing me.
BS: “Oh my gosh he’s amazing!” Right?
[laughter]
BS: So he told me that story as a way of saying, “that’s your goal, that’s your new goal”
BK: Yes.
DZ: Yeah, yeah wow.
BS: And thank goodness he did, and I got my feelings hurt and I felt defensive, and he was right.
BK: Oh this is great.
BS: And I remember it had its effect because I got… I called from my first session with Ed Cash a few months later, and it was on a Matt Wertz record, and I went in and I just imitated. I sat there at the Wurlitzer waiting and waiting, and they were like, “Is he gonna come in?” And like they, Ed still tells that story, so I was just doing what I was told by Andrew.
DZ: That’s so cool.
BS: Waited until the right moment and learned to become a bit of a self-editor… And that kind of put me on that trajectory, and production will do the same thing to you. If you’re really… If you, man, I heard a guy a couple years ago say the antithesis of what I believe about production, he said “I just want the vocal to get out of the way of my track”…
BK: Oh wow.
BS: I was like, “oh, yeah, that’s the opposite”.
BS: Like moving into production has just been more and more like, How can I get out of the way of the vocal? Make the vocal really amazing.
DZ: Yeah.
BK: Yeah.
BS: Get as good of a vocal as we can get and then just get out of the way of it. Or just like, hold it up. You know, support that thing.
DZ: Yeah.
BS: So yeah, production has also kind of, has been a long lesson for me in just, what’s necessary? What’s helpful?
BK: Yeah.
DZ: Yes.
BS: I really believe that the best players are not the ones who can do the stuff, the best players are defined by the choices they make.
BK: Yeah.
DZ: Right
BS: By what they’re “abable” [chuckles] able to do.
DZ: Right.
BS: And so, it’s great if you’ve got all the skills, you’re still gonna have to make the right choices with those skills. And if you don’t have all the skills, it’s not the end of the world to you.
BK: Yeah.
BS: You still have some choices you can make. You can still… You can still have a meaningful contribution, I believe that’s true in our churches. For sure.
BK: So that quote, “your skill is not shown by what you can play, but the choices you make” Was that kind of a rough?…
BS: Yeah. Or maybe it’s just your musicianship.
BK: Your musicianship.
BS: Yeah, I think that’s what musicianship really is.
BK: Okay, so let’s bring that into the church.
BS: Yep.
BK: What in your mind is the band doing?… What’s the relationship of the band and the congregation? Like, how do we do that?
BS: The congregation… Okay, so the worship leader is not the vocal. The congregation is the vocal.
BK: Man, can you just say that again for the sake of our listener?
BS: The worship leader is not the vocal! The congregation is the vocal, and the worship leader, is the cue, the worship leader is there to cue the congregation up to sing. That’s it. And then the band is supporting that and not only supporting it, but inviting it. There’s this needle that we thread or this fine line that we walk between on the one side, and you’ve heard me is this word of it, you made fun of me for it, but boredom is on the one side, and really boredom is just the loss of loss of energy, loss of interest, and then on the other side is over-stimulation. So we overwhelm people or we underwhelm people either way, we’re not serving them, and so we are as a band going, How can we at the right moments bring people up, and how can we at the right moments, disappear, get out of their way, become less whatever it takes, and it’s gotta be a little bit of a dance between these two.
BK: Because you’re not wanting to lead the congregation into some kind of emotional engagement strictly with the music. You’re wanting the words to do that, right. And as they’re doing it, you wanna be there to support what’s taking place and not leave them hanging out to dry.
BS: Yes, I mean, yeah, it’s… On the one hand, we could do people a disservice by trying to whip them up into a frenzy, but the truth is meant to be emotional. The truth rings our bells, that’s what it does, because we were made for it. We were made for God, and so when we see Him as He is, we feel that. And the thing is, though, that over time, repetition can cause us to become insensible, and so music does serve the purpose of helping us feel again, so it’s not wrong to help our congregations feel things when they sing the truth. So we wanna do that.
BK: Yeah, we’ve said that singing, for congregation, the goal of singing is to enable them to feel the truth, that’s what singing for. Otherwise, you just sit around and talk about true things, your affections are never affected and then you leave the same as you came in with more knowledge, which is a dangerous thing.
BS: Yeah, and so I talked about this at Sing! a couple of years ago, you could probably find it, but I’ve come to in my production over time to find the word dynamics just for myself more broadly than it’s defined in a textbook, so I know that dynamics is loud and soft, and that’s true. I’m not really arguing with that, but when I think about dynamics, I’m thinking about all of the ways that we use change to help it to help the song do what it is intended to do.
BK: That’s good.
BS: And so there’s all kinds of changes that we effect over the course of a really good arrangement, there can be the dynamics of how many people are playing alone There’s dynamics of how things like how we fill out the chords over the course of the song.
BS: Often at the beginning of a song, we’re leaving out the thirds of the chords to let them have a little hollowness and maybe, or maybe we’re voicing them with just a couple of notes, like if I’m playing a song on the piano at the beginning of the song, I may just be playing one note in my right hand, or it might be a two. As I move forward through the song, I’m going, let’s fill it in with thirds, now let’s play an octave in the left hand, just like increasing polyphony, increasing the notes that are included in chords. So all these kinds of things. And you could go on and on. You could talk about registers..
BK: Yeah, let’s hang right here
BS: Yeah
BK: Keep talking about some of those things that make for good dynamics with a band.
BS: Yes. Yeah so registers, right? You could say, “Hey, at the beginning of this song,” okay, if I’m leading the band, I might go, “Hey, guitar, I’d like you to be out at first. And piano, I’d like you playing just like right around, middle C and below. Nothing up high for a bit. And I’d like to wait on the bass or bass can be in, but not down low on the neck, like up high, like, let’s have everything kinda low and kinda in the middle… This is just one example.
BK: Yeah,
BS: even though it’s one that we use often, ’cause it works, and then we go, Okay, hey piano when we get to second chorus, let’s be at a place now where your chords have four notes in the right hand and two notes in the left, all the fingers that you pretty much have available really playing strongly. And then when we get to that last verse, why don’t we have piano drop out ’cause we’ve been listening to piano for the whole song, so you’re trying to create a little change just by going like, hey, we’ve been hearing this same timbre the whole time wouldn’t it be nice if it just went away for a moment and maybe guitar, could still be in and sort of in the opposite move then, from what we started with, we started with piano down low, maybe in this third verse, we’ve got guitar up high.
BS: And he can do that for a minute and then we can all come back in on the last chorus and whatever. It’s those kind of moves that have to do with thinking about how we can use change to keep the song fresh, and as we do that, always keeping an eye on the ball of, “Hey, we’re not trying to be cute here.” The point isn’t just to say, “Look what we did here,” the point is, so that people can sing, and that ends up being a real governor for you because it’s, well, it’s a governor and it does both, it constrains you in both directions because you go, not enough dynamic, not enough change, and people aren’t getting… They’re not inspired by the emotion of the song and they may not sing as like lustily, you want that. However, too many changes, too many, “look what we did there” moments, and all of a sudden people are going, “Wow, this is a cool arrangement,” and maybe they’re sitting back a little bit, instead of being like, “I’m here.” And it also kinda, part of what, even as you’re saying, I want a strong sense of dynamics to guide the way that I use registers, you’re also going to be paying attention to what the congregation is singing, as you choose a register, it’s like
DZ: Right.
BS: You know what the congregation is singing, super low right now. And that means that their voices are all gonna be a little darker and they might have a hard time hearing themselves because they’re so low, so I’m gonna be careful not to fill my voicings out too much, I’m gonna be careful not to have 12 things going on on the stage really. Let’s just have one or two instruments in because they’re so low, and then when we get to the chorus there, they’re up on a high three, so let’s fill our voicings out more to support them, but maybe we could keep that high three out of our voicing, just so they can hear the melody really strongly. And to some degree, those are… That’s a little more like college level thinking. Not everyone is gonna able to recognize what note the congregation is on, but that is there, and I’ll tell you when session players play on records, they’re thinking about that, they’re thinking about, “Where is the vocal and how can I stay an inversion below or whatever,” What can I do to support what the vocal is doing.
BK: And I hope are. If you’re listening to this and you’re thinking, Yeah, the members of my team should be listen to. Yeah, watch it or listen to it with the members of your team, because these principles, they’re just, they apply universally for Sunday morning, you can apply them to every song every Sunday and just are so helpful.
DZ: Yeah
BS: Well, and you have to… And the thing is, you won’t watch something like this and then immediately know what to do, but you do, hopefully you hear what we’re talking about here. And you say, I need to start thinking about this. Yes, and then you get to experiment and you find it, you will find. Something that someone said to me recently, I had never heard this before. I think it was Don Chaffer was talking about it at Lipscomb of weeks ago, he said that, and he was quoting T Bone Burnett when they’re in the studio, When T Bone’s in the studio. So we’re all stealing from each other when they’re in the studio, they don’t talk about John’s guitar part, they talk about the guitar part, and what I mean, the difference between those things is, I would love it if players at churches everywhere started to think, not, What am I here to do. How am I here to express myself? Self-expression is whatever. I’m not against it, but it’s not really what we’re doing.
BK: No
DZ: Right
BS: No, right. And it’s not what we’re doing on Sunday morning, honestly, it’s not even what we’re doing in the studio,
BK: That’s exactly right.
BS: Great players and arrangers are doing… It’s not self-expression, it’s, We’re talk about the guitar part because we are looking for almost like that platonic ideal of the guitar part on this song that what is. We know it’s out there. What is the guitar part that will support the vocal and also the other members of the arrangement, and I would love it if players at churches starting to go on a Sunday morning, a little less touchy about criticism because when what they have played is interacted with in a constructive way. It’s not, we’re not talking about me.
BK: Yeah
DZ: Yes
BS: We’re talking about the guitar part. And they’re just on the hunt, and anyone who can help them find it is a friend, is an ally.
BK: Yeah,
BS: And I would love to see us think that way,
DZ: We’ve talked a lot about that just in song writing, and even working with you, Ben, and all that you bring, you brought to our team is, “best idea wins.” It takes it outside of, well my idea wins, or your idea wins. It’s best idea wins, and it’s like best part wins for the overall feel of the song, and I just think that’s so helpful
BK: And the best part maybe at times not playing…
DZ: Exactly,
BS: That’s right
BK: For me, which is hard to, it’s a hard concept to get into your brain.
BS: Yes, and it’s easiest to get there.. There are two things that makes me wanna say. One is, yes, absolutely. If you’re thinking about dynamics and one of the dynamics that you use isn’t silence, you’re not thinking about dynamics quite right.
BS: And so it’s like, yeah, there needs to be times when you’re not playing for sure, and there should be times when everyone on the platform is not play interchangeably. Everyone needs to take a turn not playing.
DZ: Right,
BK: Especially the drummers.
BS: Yes. The other thing I wanted to say is that in… By the way, there are plenty of times when I get defensive when somebody criticizes what I’m doing,
BK: We understand no one’s perfect on this podcast
BS: But ask any one of my clients, and they will tell you there are times, especially when he’s hungry, Ben is gonna get defensive. From time to time. So, I think one thing that does help us get a little less concerned about criticism of our part is that is when we’re not only interested in finding our part, when we’re interested in finding the whole thing together. There’s a picture that we can make if we’re all working together and we’re just trying to find it.
BK: Yeah, that is so good. Oh my gosh, you know what? There’s a lot more questions I wanna ask. Yes, could you do this – could we do another podcast with you?
BS: Yeah, let’s do it
BK: Okay, we’re gonna close this one. There are so many ideas that you have given us like in this brief time, but I know there are more, and there’s some specific questions I wanna ask you, so we’re gonna sign off and see you next time.
BS: Do we need to change shirts?
BK: No we don’t need to change shirts. You can keep the same shirt ’cause we’re gonna keep the same shirts on too.
DZ: Stay as you are
BK: Thanks for joining us.
