Ben Shive

This just might be the best debut you’ll grab this year. And if you haven’t yet listened to Ben Shive and heard for yourself the reason we gave The Ill-Tempered Klavier a 9 out of 10, then stop reading this and head to his MySpace page. But for the already initiated, we wanted to give you a greater glimpse into the songwriting genius of Ben Shive.

From the ‘nerdy’ title to it’s brilliant pop kaleidoscope, Shive’s musical gift to us this year came earlier than Christmas, but we’ll still be enjoying it until then. It was a pleasure to sit down with Ben and have him divulge all his secrets for us - where he gets his musical ideas, how he got started, and where that title comes from.

Soul-Audio: So you’ve been working on Ill-Tempered Klavier since 2006.

Ben Shive: That’s correct.

SA: When you first started the process and you kept the same title the whole time, is the final product what you pictured two years later?

Ben: Yeah, mostly. The only difference is that I’m a young writer and I was an even younger writer then. There are a couple songs, one in particular, that we cut on this original tracking session that we recorded that was very different from where the record ended up. At the time I started writing several years ago, I was really into Peter Gabriel. So we recorded this one song that was a real Peter Gabriel kind of thing.

So in that sense, that changed since then. My vision for maybe what my sound would be started to solidify as I wrote more songs; it started to become more clear what world I wanted to land in sonically. So something that was blatantly Peter Gabriel wouldn’t fit into my world sonically. But I think I did know back then that I wanted it to have a little bit of that psychedelic Beatles thing happening.

SA: What happened to that song?

Ben: It was a song called “We Are One” and it was a blatant rip-off of this Peter Gabriel. But then again, another song which did appear reworked is “She is the Rising Sun” because to me, that song does land or it could have landed in that Peter Gabriel or Marc Cohn kind of space - dark and warm. There’s some drum programming on that song, which is the only one that has that, and part of the reason I did that was because I wanted to mess it up. I wanted to challenge that song to be something different than it was. It could have easily sounded like something from the Lion King soundtrack and I wanted to challenge it and help it find a home in what it turned out to be.

SA: I have to ask about the title - Ill-Tempered Klavier.

Ben: It’s sort of a nerdy title. That’s for sure. There were a collection of pieces by [Johann Sebastian] Bach called The Well-Tempered Clavier. And forgive me if I get this wrong - I’m not a student of this kind of thing. I don’t deserve to make these kind of jokes. But as I understand it, he wrote this collection after they learned to temper piano tunings, which is to not tune each note to its perfect mathematical pitch but to tune each note with a little bit of leeway so the whole thing ends up sounding better. It’s hard to understand why that would work, but it does. That’s tempering. So he wrote these pieces after he figured that out.

I figured the Ill-Tempered Klavier was fitting probably just because I thought it was funny, but it has the right meanings for me. Ill-tempered meaning this piano, which represents me, maybe not all the components of my personality are held in good tension. Some of them stick out or jut out a bit too far.

Another meaning would also mean a grouchy mood. I like that. I don’t know why. But I like this person who isn’t always happy or feels good. I also like it that the title is a songbook-y kind of name. A jazz record will be called The Cole Porter Songbook. I don’t think of this as a concept album… a friend of mine told me it’s like me vomiting up my childhood. These songs don’t have a common thread, they’re just me processing a pretty large chunk of my life. That’s what the title means to me.

SA: There are so many shades and decades of pop music represented here. That has to be something you grew up on.

Ben: Definitely. I definitely grew up listening to oldies radio in my parent’s car and my dad had an LP of Sgt. Pepper’s which was one of the first records I took over for myself. It really shaped what I liked about music and what I like about production - the idea that you could have a theme in your head and challenge your songs, cutting them into pieces and putting them back together again. That’s something I grew up on, as well as the Beach Boys.

Then maybe for the last six or seven years, I’ve just become a real avid listener - trying to understand the kinds of music I hadn’t previously known about. As an example, if you had talked to me in high school or college about music, I would have been pretty intolerable to talk to because I had a lot of snobbery about what was good and bad. I’ve tried to learn to appreciate music that I used to be snobbish about. I hated all that ’80s music with the synthesizers, but now I love that stuff. I really appreciate it. It’s so dated, but that’s what makes it adorable.

So that’s the same period of time that I’ve been writing and I’ve been discovering all this music that I hadn’t let myself before. And as I discover them, I would think, ‘Oh man, I love that song. I want one like that!’ A friend of mine told me that the new album is like listening to a mix-tape. And in a way, it is. It’s me discovering a bunch of styles of music and saying, ‘I need one of those.’ So if there’s a criticism for me to level against my own record, which is also what I like about it, it’s that, in a way, there isn’t an original thought on there. It’s all me going, ‘Here’s what I love. Let me relate it back to you in my own voice.’ Does that make sense?

SA: Yeah, in fact, I wanted to ask around that. Everything on the album seems perfectly placed and very pored over. So I didn’t know if that was an homage to this time period or this artist so you have a template already in place?

Ben: I see what you mean and I think, in a lot of cases, that’s true. I think that way, again for better or for worse, as a producer a lot of times. When I hear a new song, I often try to find a place to put it in my brain - a file that it makes sense in. Now, which file or space that ends up in will help me know what kind of textures belong on it. But I also hope it’s not that simple. One example would be “Do You Remember” - the rhythm that’s happening is pretty much “Don’t Worry Baby” by The Beach Boys. It’s the same tempo, real similar feel and one of my favorite songs ever… [Laughs] Wait, I’m giving myself away. What am I doing?

But to me, it doesn’t fit in that category because there’s a harpsichord and cellist. Even though Brian Wilson would use those instruments, they are not from that era at all. Plus the snare drum playing in the intro came from The Royal Tennenbaums. So I try not to say, ‘Oh, okay, that’s what that song is’ and paint-by-numbers on top of that. I feel like I am always borrowing, to be honest, but I don’t borrow it all from one place at one time… Wow, I’m definitely giving you enough rope to hang me. [Laughs]

• www.benshive.com
• www.myspace.com/benshive

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#1 MattConner.net » Blog Archive » S-A Interview: Ben Shive on August 15th, 2008 at 1:24 pm

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