Versions of Blank Face have been around since 2007, when I wrote it during a songwriters' workshop led by Linford Detweiler and Karin Bergquist in Santa Fe. After hearing a couple of my suite-length mini-pop-operas (see Lake Superior below), Karin challenged me to write something simple, so I went to a practice room and wrote Blank Face for the next day's class. Though we recorded the song for All Saints' Day, it didn't make the final tracklist (except in instrumental form as Marty & the Leonids). I'm glad it's finally seeing the light of day.

I want Blank Face to serve as a sort of spiritual overture, like A Simple Song from Leonard Bernstein’s mass, or Bill Callahan’s Jim Cain. For better or for worse, it also makes me think of Oh What a Beautiful Morning. I hate that song, but it’s definitely buried somewhere in Blank Face’s DNA.

- Steve

"I think that it was not easy, and may have been impossible, for her to make peace with our experience of mortality and error, of owning what we cannot correct or save, of losing what we love."

– Wendell Berry, “A World Lost”

What I remember most about recording the original Hole in the Sky is playing long, unpleasant notes on my dusty French horn until I was red-faced and breathless, dying to stop as after each take Steve said, “Great! Let’s just do that one more time.” It wasn’t my favorite song. It was repetitious, dissonant, unrelenting, and it made me uncomfortable.

So of all the songs I could have covered, why this one? I’m still not sure. I think I chose it because it was a challenge, musically and otherwise. It was uneasy in every sense, and I was ready for a confrontation. And as I grappled with this thing, it put its bony finger right on a major artery of human experience and felt the pulse of my own grief, the discomfort of living in the tension between presence and absence, ground and sky, visible and invisible, the weight of absence so tangible you can hold it in your arms, and the relentless repetition of grief that leaves us red-faced and breathless again and again, somewhere between this world and the world to come.

- Allison

To hear Steve's version of the song and read the story behind it, go here.

Steve felt that Quiet Revival needed some kind of short instrumental introduction before the song could properly begin. So, taking bits and pieces of pre-recorded material from the song, rearranging and manipulating them, I started to do just that. But when my twenty second introduction turned into a two minute introduction, we realized that I had created a new totally separate track.

The process felt like writing a found poem, or blacking out the newspaper to find hidden epiphanies, only with music instead of words.

- Blade

This song is about two funerals, one of which took place in rural Kansas and the other in rural Missouri. I wrote the first lines of the song in the margins of my notebook during a poetry class in college a few months before either of those funerals actually took place, which is a fact that has always bothered me, but there it is. The funeral in Kansas really was situated right next to the remains of a church that had burnt down a few months before.

Quiet Revival didn't make the album because I couldn't handle including yet another full-on dirge (in addition to 'Wake', 'Faith', etc.) but I'm still proud of it lyrically, and I think that whirlwind of a B-section is pretty neat. I'm also glad you get to hear Becca Kreutz's vocals. She was a great creative partner during the All Saints' Day era, but this our only collaboration to see the light of day (so far).

- Steve

I found Steve's music my first month at Wheaton College when, alone in my dorm room, I filtered a MySpace search to find bands in Wheaton, Illinois. I found only three results: a pop punk band called Colored by Numbers, Wheaton's only death metal band Melchizedek and a band called The Miner Prophets. Melchizedek was pretty good and Colored By Numbers were not my thing but The Miner Prophets made me excited and confused. The only song on the page was called "Lake Superior" and it had everything: hushed vocals, clanging grand piano, flying violins and a drummer playing free jazz with brushes. I listened to the song a lot and then messaged the dude behind the madness, assuming he was a student at the conservatory. Steve messaged me back, said thanks and that he wasn't a conserve student which, in the weird Wheaton social culture, made him instantly approachable. Then I don't believe I actually met him until we started working together a few months later in the chapel, videotaping classical performances.

I think it was over a year later that Steve talked about playing some new songs and showed me a demo of 'Long Year'. I was astounded. It sounded like a lost track from Nilsson Sings Newman. I knew a little bit about Steve's father passing away from secondhand sources but the lyrics to this song tore open the time-space continuum and put me right next to Steve in the aftermath of the funeral. How can this guy be writing these lyrics about his dad and not just implode? "Let's say he made it / Let's just say that this was all some crazy dream / I wouldn't take it / and I know that if he could, neither would he." I couldn't handle that. It's a beautiful mix of poetry and nonchalant observation. The ascending piano line sounds like one of those hooks that you assume has already been written by someone famous. The atonal plinking in the second verse is weirdly moving. It's my favorite song of Steve's.

I practiced playing it a lot during the summer of that school year, trying to make the piano hook work on guitar. The guitar on the recorded version is basically unchanged from what I worked out almost five years ago. My wife suggested Steve's boyfriend David, who is an incredible violinist, play on the track and the rest is history. I'll say that I still feel a little weird playing a song that is so personal to Steve but I'm at peace with it now because I realized that covering the song is a really awesome way of sharing Steve's experience and getting to know Steve. I feel that through recording this song I've come to understand my friend a little better and I'm grateful that I had the chance to do that.

- Lee

To hear Steve's version of the song and read the story behind it, go here

I wrote this--my first-ever song--when I was 18. The summer before I started college I participated in a pre-frosh wilderness backpacking trip in Michigan's Upper Peninsula. After 13 days of hiking, we reached Lake Superior, whose water is fresh enough we were able to dip our water bottles right in and take a drink. We really did take Communion on the beach, using Superior water and a hearty but tasteless trail food called bucket bread as our elements, and then we each set off in different directions and spent 36 hours alone, with nothing but the lake for company.

It was the longest amount of time I'd ever spent alone, outdoors, and away from the internet. After building a shelter out of a tarp and some driftwood, I spent most of my 36-hour solo writing these lyrics. Then I spent my first semester at college composing the piano arrangement, which I haven't changed much in the nine years since then.

I should mention that those 48 hours on the beach in Michigan were what I would now call a sort of religious conversion. Even though I'd been raised in the church, my experience of my own faith had always been marked by the feeling that I was an outsider, as though I were viewing something beautiful and warm through thick, frosted-glass windows. That day-and-a-half I spent on the lake, sitting in silence and writing this goofy song about a sunset, was the first time belief in God seemed to involve me in any real way, the first time all that warmth and light touched my own body.

Preserving it forever by releasing it is a bit scary for me, but the All Saints’ Day / All Souls’ Day story would feel incomplete without it.

- Steve

This hymn, which is best known as the song Nate Saint and Jim Elliot sang before being killed by members of the Waodani tribe in Ecuador, has become a patron hymn for my family. My dad chose it when planning his own funeral, assuring us that we'd have trouble in the hereafter if we sang 'It Is Well With My Soul' instead.

Hymns have this strange power of dramatic compression. I once saw a production of 'The Crucible' where the cast sang hymns while they moved the stage dressings around between scenes--the knife-twist of watching Elizabeth Proctor and Rev. Parris carrying either end of a wooden table while singing the alto and tenor lines of 'Ah, Holy Jesus' was too much for me. Similarly, I will not forget singing 'We Rest On Thee' in a small church in Missouri along with my mom and siblings, some college friends, extended family members, and people from every church I'd ever been a part of, including plenty of people I didn't like very much. The hymn's loaded history, my own family's story and the lives of all the people in that church--all of it is now compressed and stored in that Finlandia melody, and even if my mind someday deteriorates due to dementia I think those associations will always be there. My grandfather was nonverbal for the last three years of his life, but he could still sing more verses of 'O For a Thousand Tongues to Sing' from memory than there were printed in the hymnal.

Allison and I wrote our own melody for 'We Rest on Thee' over the course of a week or so, sending emails back and forth with iPhone voice memos attached. We quoted just enough of the traditional 'Finlandia' melody to tie it to the version of the hymn most people know, but we departed from it enough that I can make it through the song without crying, which is helpful.

- Steve