In the midst of multiple crises; the pandemic, the election, social injustice, climate change, fires, violence in the streets, domestic terror attacks, a healing balm appeared in the form of what I predict will become an anthemic song for our times. The Keep Going Song opens with the self-introduction of Abigail and Shaun Bengson. My peeps decked out in celestial star-sparkled splendor (Abigail) and rose-colored Hawaiian shirt (Shaun) invite us into their home, well really Shaun’s parents’ house where they have been hunkered down for months during the quarantine. This improv piece acknowledges the shared pain, injects humor and hope, unifying us in the full humanity of this moment in time. I have listened to it no less than a dozen times since last week and it clearly strikes a chord (no pun intended) with listeners since, to date, the video has been viewed 277,188 times. I have seen it posted on several friends’ social media pages and I have shared it widely. If you have discovered a treasure, you can’t keep it to yourself.
Each time I listened to this marvelous earworm I have cried…I dare you not to tear up. This is a fervent prayer for peace and relief, for joy and momentum as we honor the ancestors and the next generations.
Can you tell us about your backstories, such as how you met and the pivotal moment when you knew you were going to be musical collaborators and life partners?
Abigail and I met in a band in Brooklyn. After knowing each other for a little, but never having been alone in the same room, we decided to form our own band. Our first rehearsal became our first date and then three weeks later we were married. That was 13 years ago now! So, it really all happened at the same moment, our collaboration in music and in life.
After we got married we quit our day jobs, gave up our apartments in NYC, and hit the road, just traveled from gig to gig for years – which is just a glamorous way to say we were essentially homeless. We were put up by venues and theaters, crashed on the couches of so many friends and family, and lived that way for almost a decade until we finally got a place of our own again in Queens right before our son was born.
What do you think prepared you for this moment in time?
I don’t know that anything exactly prepares you for this. But I do think we’ve always been a bit apocalyptically inclined, or at least been very aware of the general tenuousness of things. Our work has long been about the question of what you do when everything falls apart or how do you live your life knowing that it could end at any moment. And I think the answer for us has always been that the tenuousness makes it all the more precious – you don’t ever know how much time you’ll have with someone so you just try to live each day as fully as you can. So I think there was something about an actual little apocalypse that felt like, yep, finally it’s here. And some folks have actually reached out to us this year saying for the first time they understand our work! Our worry and exploration of frailty in our art I think does make a little more sense in this new context, for better or worse.
Is your 3-year-old musical too?
Oh, you better believe he is! He just turned 4 in September and he is always singing and dancing. He loves all things Mario so he’s constantly humming video game music while he plays with his toys. (His favorites are intense boss themes!) He’s always writing little songs, too.
Please talk about Hundred Days.
Hundred Days is a concert/musical about all of those apocalyptic feelings we just talked about! It follows the three weeks between our first date and getting married, in which we were both just out of our minds with love and anxiety. It asks the question of what would you do if you only had 100 days with the person you love, and our answer is just to try to live that 100 days as though it were your whole life together. We started writing it that first year we were together and it’s had quite a long life now, it’s been really interesting to perform it in our 20s and now our 30s. I hope we get the privilege to do it as old fogies one day!
I think that the Keep Going Song will become an anthem for the pandemic. How did it come to be born?
Oh, that’s so kind to say! When the pandemic started we were doing the music for a show in Louisville at the Actors Theatre (Where the Mountain Meets the Sea, a beautiful play by Jeff Augustin). The major canceled all public events after our first day of performances and suddenly we only had 24 hours before we’d have to leave our theater housing and we didn’t know what to do. Our apartment is in Central Queens, which was the epicenter of the virus, so we decided just to go to my folks’ house a couple of hours away in Dayton for a week or two while we sorted ourselves out. We genuinely weren’t sure if we’d ever work again, everything had been canceled. We ended up staying with my folks for over half a year.
Then in May, miracle of miracles, we got a call out of the blue from Robert and Emily, the leaders of The Actors Theatre of Louisville. They asked us if we would create something for their online season they were putting together. Robert said that as bleak as things were in the summer it was gonna get way worse in the fall. He said people would be hurting and he asked us if we could try and make something that could bring a little hope for him and his Louisville community.
We thought long and hard about how to approach this and ended up deciding to try and sing about resilience. There was no shortage of heroism at this moment in our world – in the people putting their health at risk to work on the front lines of our hospitals, in all the folks working jobs required to keep our country going, parents suddenly raising children entirely on their own, and all those who were marching to call for equality for Black lives – but we knew the tasks were so hard and would take so long. So the title song, The Keep Going On Song, became a prayer of sorts – a call out to everyone in our lives who we knew were hurting. And it was a call to our own hearts, too. The Keep Going On Song chorus was what we would sing to ourselves when we were struggling to get through each new day. So we thought if this is helpful for us, maybe it might be for even one other person. We played it first for Robert and Emily, full of worry and self-doubt, but they said, yep, this feels good, keep going, so we did.
What are you hoping people will experience when they listen to it?
Our big hope is that someone might feel a little less alone in their woundedness and their hurt. We hope that it might bring even a tiny sliver of light to their day. Cause we are over here hurting like hell but it makes it a little lighter for me when I can be inside it with someone else. We also think things have changed so rapidly and daily events are so destabilizing, we hope that sitting down with the album or the song might give someone a moment to step back and just let some of the emotion of the year pass through them.
Has it helped you heal as well?
You know, it actually has. It really was our mantra as we tried to push through each day. And life has continued to be pretty sad and challenging over here and the responses from folks have been a true gift and seen us through some hard moments.
What kind of feedback have you received?
When we wrote it, we genuinely weren’t sure if anyone other than our parents would ever hear it! We didn’t know if anyone would wanna pay for our super lo-fi theater online. We are also much more used to doing shows live, so there was a very wild feeling of just knowing it was out there in the world but not getting any live response. We were just going about our days, being with our little boy, and working on our many other deadlines we had fallen behind on, meanwhile, folks were taking in the material. It was a big gift and a surprise when the NYTimes reviewed it, we really didn’t expect that.
Then the greater surprise still came just a couple of weeks ago – Sarah Groke and Travis Staton-Marerro, NYC based performers, created a dance piece to the Keep Going Song title track and it starting going all over social media. Then people followed through to the original version we did and that one went all over the place, too. We’ve never had something like that happen with one of our songs before, something going “viral”, and it was a pretty remarkable and humbling experience. There has been a real outpouring of love from people in response to the song, we’ve received many letters from people in hard times, it has been a true gift to hear from them all.
Another surprise for us is many pastors and rabbis have reached out to us wanting to use music from the album in their services. My father was a pastor and I grew up in the church and then moved sharply away from it. I’ve been finding my own way back these last few years but it has been moving to me the way that these communities have been reaching out.
As this is running around Election Day, what is your vision for the future of the world?
Oof, this is a good question. We’re taking some of those good anti-anxiety drugs, for one thing! Go, science! We have been very lucky to get to be in Ohio and now in Vermont, and being outdoors has definitely been our number one sanity check. Having a four-year-old does wonders for keeping your head in the present, too. We’ve been trying to get outside with our boy whenever possible. 3 1/2 and 4 is the age when people start making their first life long memories, so we feel a real responsibility to try to make all this good for him. And, bless his heart, he really is a little joy machine, he really does want to be happy and he helps us to find that, too.
I’m definitely worried about how everything might go down on election day, tensions are unbelievably high. There is much to be afraid about, from spiraling income inequality, to systemic racism, to the potential of environmental collapse. But, as Fred Rogers said, “look for the helpers,” and I’m truly inspired and in awe of the people working to make our world better. For every problem that I might be freaked out by, I know there are people out there who have devoted their lives to solving it.
So I’d ask people to vote. And also to pay attention to your local government and organizations. I guarantee there is someone in your state doing the work you would like to see done. Find them, support them, learn from them. There is a lot of bleakness in our world but there are also so many good, beating hearts, turning each day towards the possibility of a better future.
What else would you like to share?
If folks would like to see the hour-length Keep Going On Song visual album, it’s being brought to Broadway On Demand. It should be launching any day, we’ll let everyone know when it’s gone live. The album, The Keep Going Song: Live from our House at the End of the World, is currently streaming on Spotify and available to download on iTunes and Amazon Music (as well as most places you can find digital music).
We’d also like to say – these are hard times and we need each other. So dear readers, we’d like to be a part of your community, if you would let us. Please reach out to us if there is anything we can do or just to say hello. (The website is http://bengsons.com/)
Thank you very much for having us, Edie, and thank you everyone for taking the time to read this and listen to the tunes. We’re sending our best to you all.
Keep going on song
This is the keep going keep going keep going keep going on
Keep going on song{Verse 1}
Heyheyayay
I am Abigail, and this is Shaun
And we’re so glad that you’ve turned this on
And welcomed us into your home and
You are welcome into our home
We’re in Dayton Ohio-oooooh {Dayton Ohio}
In Shaun’s parents’ house. {My parents’ house}
Shaun’s parent’s house
We were in Louisville when the shit
Hit
And we packed our three-year-old into a car
And we drove kinda far
And we drove here
And we are so lucky and blessed to be safely here
And we thought we’d be here for like ten days, tops!
{What did we know?} What did we know?
{What did we know?} What did we know?
We thought we knew a lot
We thought we knew a lotWoooo! Keep going on song
This is the keep going keep going keep going on
Keep going on song
This is the keep going keep going keep going on
Keep going on song{Verse 2}
And we’ve been mostly healthy
We’ve been okay. Are you okay?
Are you alright? Are you okay?
Are you alright? Are you okay?
I hope your body is whole tonight
And if your heart is breaking
I hope it’s breaking open
And if your breath is shaking
I hope it’s shaking though
And I hope that you’ve watched a lot of
Really great television
Like, a lot of it!
And I hope that you find a hand lotion that
Actually makes your skin feel better
And I hope that you have enough to eat
Hope you’re getting enough sleep
And I hope you have enough good company
Or enough good memories
To last you a long time{Keep going refrain background }
Keep going keep going keep going on
Keep going on song
We sing the keep going keep going keep going keep going on
Keep going on song{Verse 3}
Let’s bring some joy into the room. Why not?
We could try it. We could try it
Or some rage
And some grief
And relief
Oohoo-woah I hold my rage
I pray my rage is a fire
That cleans my mind out
And makes me ready to listen
I pray my pain is a river
That flows to the ocean
That connects my pain to yours
And I pray I pray my happiness like pollen
That flies to you and pollinates your joy oh boy
Oh boy is that possible?
I don’t know I don’t know
We are making this up as we go
We have to make this up as we go
The keep going song
The keep going on song
Oh we’re making it up
We’re making it up as we goKeep going keep going keep going on
Keep going on song{Verse 4}
And I pray
When we meet again
That the world has changed
Into the world that we are imaging now together
And I pray that the world has become
The world that we’re planting inside of ourselves
For each other
For our ancestors
And for our kids
Oo-oo-ohAnd we’re going to start
We’re going to start
This is a rough beginning
That’s all I’ve got
Is a rough beginning
To offer you
We’re going to start by singing some songs
In this tiny space together
We’re just going to sing some songs for you
And we hope that when you hear them
You will feel a little bit less alone
And we will feel a little bit less alone
In the work
And in the hurt
And we will be together tonight somehow
Whenever this is
Wherever this is
We will be together tonightFor the
Keep going keep going keep going on
Keep going on song
This is the
Keep going keep going keep going on
Keep going on song
This is the
Keep going keep going keep going on
Keep going on song
This is the
Keep going keep going keep going on
Keep going on song
This is the
Keep going keep going keep going on
Keep going on song”
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Photo courtesy of The Bengsons