Baby steps beyond rainbow-ladder

We discuss the impact of including corrections beyond single gluon exchange in light mesons within the nonperturbative framework of Dyson-Schwinger equations (DSE) and Bethe-Salpeter equations (BSE). We do this by considering unquenching effects in the form of hadronic resonance contributions, notably pion exchange, and by the inclusion of the dominant gluon self-interactions to the quark-gluon vertex. Thus we make steps towards an ab initio description of light mesons by functional methods.