How To Make Beautiful Things When You're A Grownup And You Have To Be Responsible.

The Quiet Hours books are going to print at the beginning of next week, and I could not be more thrilled. Both at the idea that these are going to actually exist and that I’ll have some brain space ready to do literally anything else again in my life. For the past six months, I’ve done almost nothing else but work on these books.

Now I’m looking up and realizing how much time has passed. I feel like Encino Man or Luke Wilson in Idiocracy (I think we all feel a bit like him these days…) waking up in the distant future.

There’s a lot of other work to do as we get ready to bring the books to life: Setting up websites and marketing assets, making sure things get shipped in time, and all the other business-y kinds of stuff for the books. Then there’s taking care of the new Anchor Hymns albums, which have started to release, and some more writings and recordings which we’re about to start this fall.

I’m also doing a lot more work with Belmont University, where I’ve started a new role as an artist advocate for their Creative Arts Collective. It’s essentially an artist-in-residence role where I get to help them use their large endowment to support artists in creative ways — and also get supported by it at the same time in my own creative work. Praise the Lord! This gives me a little runway for the Quiet Hours while we get it off the ground. What a godsend.

But here’s the thing: that’s my job, which thankfully I really love and am excited about, but there are also some things I’d like to do that aren’t my “actual” work.

For instance: I’ve listened to nothing but instrumental and ambient music for the last year as I’ve been writing. Here’s a playlist of some of my favorites from the past year.

(That Explosions in the Sky song “Peace or Quiet” has the most amazing guitar sound I’ve ever heard, by the way.)

This is something I’ve dabbled in over the years. I’ve made a few tracks on records as in-between pieces and have put out instrumental versions of my albums. I even released one instrumental EP a while back. I actually made a bunch of EPs of instrumental sketches when Alison first got cancer that I released under the name The Quiet Hours, though I’m stealing that name now for a much better project. Those are fine, though admittedly not amazing. Basically self-therapy that was good enough to put out, but not anything I felt like spending a bunch of time and energy promoting.

Now, though, I really want to get invested in this kind of music. I miss playing, I miss writing, I miss recording. I miss making music with my friends. Like, a lot. I LOVE making music more than just about anything, and I haven’t done much of it at all this year.

But that’s real life, right? We don’t always get to do the stuff we most want to do. Who has the opportunity? Who has the time?!

Have you ever felt this way? Have you had a desire to do something, to make something, to exercise, to gather with people, to do something outside of your regular duties… but you didn’t have the bandwidth or resources to take a season or month or week or whatever to go and do it? You don’t have a studio or an ocean or a band or the right gear or a quiet place or whatever you tell yourself you need. It can eat you up inside.

Honestly, I think some of the biggest discontentment we feel as humans is looking out a window at an open field, wanting to run, and knowing your to-do list will keep you busy until the sun goes down.

When that goes on day after day it can be crushing.

What do we do?

For me, I’ve had to learn to carve and get creative.

To carve time out of my schedule, to carve space out of my home. To make hours and resources and square feet for the things that make me human in a way that nothing else does.

In my life those things are hiking and making music.

I’ve learned that not exercising makes me a very unhealthy person, not just physically, but emotionally, temperamentally, spiritually, you name it. The same with being outside. I’m near Radnor Lake or Percy Warner Park when I drop my daughter off at school in the morning. For the past two and a half, almost three years now, I’ve gone almost every morning and walked for an hour out in the woods. Carve the time.

Morning meetings? I try to do them out there as much as possible. You’d be shocked at how many people are thrilled by the suggestion. My time is limited, so I had to get creative. That hike and open invitation is now one of the most rewarding parts of my life.

To make music, I’ve gone the night owl route. At my old job, even though I worked at a record company and was working on, talking about, and playing on music all the time - it was never my own music. Finally, I had to go and make myself a commitment. I would set aside a few evenings a week, after dinner and time with family, where Dad would go down to the basement and create.

I used to have a nicer, cooler studio in an impressive building. I worked at the Art House, Charlie Peacock’s old place. That was amazing. But that place is gone now, and it doesn’t make sense to do something like that these days anyway. But I could take a little corner of the basement, block it off with old Ikea cube shelves and cubicle partitions I got off of Amazon, and make it work. It looks cooler on YouTube than it does in real life (what doesn’t?) but it gets the job done.

Having the time set and a space to work gave me something to look forward to. I had something to think about throughout the days and weeks. I could plan ahead, get excited about what I was going to do the next night. “Ok, I’m gonna play bass on that song” or “I’m gonna work on that vocal tonight” “Tonight is guitar night!” or whatever. Then I could go downstairs, get that piece of the song sounding a little better, feel like a musician again, and have a sense of accomplishment. I didn’t finish a record or book a world tour, but I felt I had made the world a little more beautiful and could go to bed knowing I would come back and open those files again in a few days. Eventually, I would finish the record.

This math works. Working on my heart projects in a mad dash of guilt or shame or panic accomplishes almost nothing, and usually leaves me feeling worse about it later. But a few hours a week becomes many hours a month, becomes a whole lot of hours a year. You can actually get some real things done this way.

The older I get the more I realize that the creative life is this way for everybody. My friend Russ Ramsey has written a number of books at 5:30 AM before he starts work as a pastor. He goes to Starbucks and tries to put a thousand words on a page. A thousand words. That’s not that many. You’ve already read more than that in this post.

They don’t even have to be the best words, but they’re words. He can edit them and refine them later. What he knows is that if he spends an hour a morning three or four mornings a week, and puts those thousand words on a page for three of those mornings, in six months he can write a book.

Now he’s got six books out, is working on his seventh, and his two latest are consistently in the top ten art history books on Amazon.

My friend Ben Shive has been producing the most amazing records for twenty years now, and I’m always in awe of what he makes and how he cares for the people who trust him with their songs. But I’m also one of the lucky people who gets to occasionally hear him sit down and play piano before a show backstage and marvel at what seems to flow effortlessly from his fingers and brain (and 35 years of hard work and dedication).

Like me, he spends most of his time caring for other people’s creativity but has a passion for the things he would like to make on his own, too. For the past couple years, he’s been going out to his studio before artists show up and documenting his mornings by sitting at the piano. He’s been slowly working those little pieces into a recording, chipping away a few hours at a time, day after day, week after week, just like the rest of us. And now, just yesterday, he has put up a Kickstarter so that he can finish the project and get it out to the world.

I’ve been listening to early versions of this record as I finish my books, and it is absolutely stunning. I told him it’s the most purely “Ben” thing I think I’ve ever heard. Poetry as music. If you’ve ever wanted to be delighted by what sounds and melody can do, I cannot recommend supporting him and this Kickstarter highly enough.

Id like to think I’ve become a bit of a connoisseur of neo-classical instrumental and ambient music over the past few years, and I can tell you that what Ben is doing is the absolute best of the best. That should be no surprise.

You’ve heard his production on many records, and heard his piano playing behind a lot of great artists. I’ve been playing more and more piano recently, too. It was the first instrument I started on as a kid and it’s been a ton of fun getting back in touch with it.

But I play piano like I sing. It’s a tool I use to get my ideas across. I’m not bad at it, but I’m not a singer. I’m a singer/songwriter. Likewise, I’m not a pianist. I’m a guy who can play some piano. There’s a big difference.

Ben is a pianist AND a composer. Some of his pieces are top-of-mind sketches that he just sat down and created, yet they’re full of harmonic complexity and the kind of melodic counterpoint that you can effortlessly throw off when you have a degree in orchestration. The pieces that he’s been more intentional about and has spent time composing over weeks and months, where he’s brought in strings and other instruments (I’m pretty sure I hear the Arcadian wild at one point) are just magnificent but never heavy-handed. Everything has this delicacy to it.

I tend to play piano like Godzilla walking through Tokyo: “Here I am. Playing the piano!” Ben is tiptoeing through a room of sleeping children, not wanting to wake anybody up, bending to pray over each one before the day begins, as the sunlight dances through fluttering window shades.

So, yeah. Kickstart Ben.

It might sound crazy that people who are creative for a living still have to get creative and take the long route to make the things their hearts, minds, and bodies are desperate to make. No matter who you are, from Christopher Nolan to the movie theater’s janitor, we all have to use the nooks and crannies of spare time and energy to chase those things down.

I’d love to hear from you. What is it that you want to make? What do you want to do? What have you been dreaming about creating: whether a work of art, or of community, or a place you want to go, or a thing you want to accomplish?

How have you structured your time and energy to help you make that happen?

Put it in the comments so we can all learn from one another. Maybe I can share some of these insights in a post later on, too.

For instance, I spend a lot of time in the car, running teenagers around and taking care of errands, and I wrote this whole post over the span of two days by dictating it into my phone instead of listening to podcasts and depressing news. Today I finally sat down to edit it and post what you’re reading right now.

Carve. Get Creative.

Go support Ben and make something wonderful yourself. Have a great Sunday!