Benjamin Del Shreve is a hard man to nail down. A few days worth of phone calls cross paths in the skies over Arkansas before the musician is finally cornered on a recent Monday morning.
But with an independently released album due out Nov. 10, there is a CD to mix and master for the Fayetteville resident and his band, Benjamin Del Shreve. With a deadline looming to get the completed songs and artwork off to the company that will print the disc, time is of the essence.
"It's kind of last minute," Del Shreve said. "But we should be wrapping it up today. There's no pressure."
The album - Brilliant & Charming - is a departure from the music Del Shreve has recorded thus far in his career. The tracks are a little edgier than the folk rock Shreve recorded earlier in the decade following the collapse of Shreve's former band, the Dove Award- and American Music Award-nominated GS Megaphone, a Christian rock band.
But with a full band in tow - Olivia Apple, Ty Denison, Jonathan Holder and Kurt Currie - Brilliant & Charming follows a more alternative rock sound. Concisely and catchily expressing the new path for Del Shreve is the steady drumming, driving bass and crunching guitars of "Flowergazer": "I've got two shoulders for you my dear ... Cause there's a time to make love, I know but I know that there's a time to just kick some ass."
The buzzing guitars and power pop flow throughout Brilliant & Charming, infusing the album with keyed up sound, full of a kinetic energy. And even though the hard-charging Brilliant & Charming is a secular album, it is not without its spiritual undertones as Del Shreve is not afraid to brandish his Christian faith.
"Life is a temporal commodity," Del Shreve said. "I'm going to make it my job to make people feel alive while they are here.
"The whole album is about love. Love for God. Love for one another. Treat other people as you would treat God."
That the album is nearing release at all is in itself a near miracle. Brilliant & Charming is over a year in the making, with several bumps in the road, including the album's tracks being part of a studio repossession in Orlando.
"There was one thing after another," Del Shreve said. "I told myself that I was not going to let this album kill me, but it's been a lot of work and time to reach this point."
For a time he worked at a coffee shop in Indiana, but in 2003 Del Shreve sold or gave away most of his possessions and hit the open road, traveling across the country and eventually to Europe.
"I felt released," Del Shreve said. "I just sold everything, and if I couldn't sell it then I just gave it away. I hauled ass. I went backpacking."
Finding himself back in U.S., Del Shreve searched for a place to ground himself, a familiar place called Arkansas, where he was born and raised. With his mother and other family members living in Fayetteville, Del Shreve moved there as well, but not to play music live.
The whole band lived in a house in the winter of 2004 that was being remodeled, and Del Shreve started working at a local Barnes & Noble. With hardly any money for food, Del Shreve would eat ice during the day and eat the expired food from the bookstore at night while sharing it with his bandmates.
Slowly though, Benjamin Del Shreve got gigs around town, and in three years, the band has built a base of fans.
"Me and my boys are pretty close," Del Shreve said. "We've been through a lot. Now, looking back at all of that, it's cool. We've come a long way in promoting ourselves.
The next step in the band's continued success is shopping Brilliant & Charming to major labels. And through his connections as the former frontman of GS Megaphone, Del Shreve has friends in the industry who are willing to listen to the album.
"Once we find the right one we are going to jump in and jump hard," he said. "It looks like there is a lot of potential. It looks good for us."