A Conversation with Ben Arthur – HuffPost 5.8.14

Mike Ragogna: Hey, Ben! What the heck are you up to?

Ben Arthur: I’m finishing up my new album, which is a collection of “answer” songs, responses to other people’s either songs or short stories. We’re also mixing these songs that we did in Austin for the songwriting web series I work with called SongCraft Presents. We’re putting together pieces for Acoustic Café, and are going to broadcast some pieces about the songs. And I’m taking care of my two girls!

MR: You don’t sound like you’re doing anything lately. That’s really unfortunate.

BA: [laughs] You know it’s funny, I hear people occasionally make that kind of joke, but I’m an artist, I work on art. No one says to the plumber “You fixed how many toilets today? That’s amazing!” You know, it’s what I do. It’s not extraordinary. If you spend your time doing art, it stacks up.

MR: Let’s go into the album. The call/response concept, where did that come from and what pieces are you pickin’ on in your project?

BA: As artists, we’re all standing on the shoulders of giants, and that’s sort of a nice way of saying “stealing from” the people who influence us. I’ve always been fascinated by that process of finding a thing in someone else that sort of rocks you back on your heels and makes you think about how they’re doing what they’re doing, and pulling it apart and reacting to it. There have been a lot of amazing “answer” songs throughout our musical history; one of the most well-known is “Sweet Home Alabama,” which was an answer song to Neil Young’s “Southern Man.” So there’ve been some great ones throughout history, and it’s always fascinated me. I wrote a song that felt to me, just by the way the song came together, like a response to The Police’s “Roxanne,” and I just thought that was fun and I started working on more of them. In ways, it’s a method for poking yourself in the butt and making yourself work. It’s like “Here’s something you love, try to respond to it, and try to do something that even in a small way stands up to it.” And then I started trying to not just do music, but also try to do short stories and literary-type stuff, which was a different angle, but was something I got a huge kick out of.

MR: Were some stories more resonant with you than others, where you put more of yourself into the project than not?

BA: A lot of the stories that I worked with were really chosen for me in some way. I was working with Deborah Treisman at The New Yorker, whom I ran into at a George Saunders event, and she sent me a story by Alice Munro. I really enjoy not having to pick out things, but having them sort of set before me. Deborah kept asking me, “What do you want to write about? Pick anything from the catalog and it can be something that you can answer,” but I really enjoyed that challenge of not being part of that process and having it set before me. It’s like a method for forcing myself to do the thing that I want to do, but that’s so easy to avoid, which is writing.

MR: What is it like for you to make yourself write? What’s it like having to sit down in front of a thing and say, “Okay, here we go,” or is it just totally natural to go into that mode?

BA: Well, SongCraft Presents is in some ways related in that it’s also a method of scaring myself into doing the thing that I want to do but that’s so easy to avoid doing. If there are a bunch of cameras in your face and there’s an artist sitting across from you who you deeply admire and want to impress, you’re going to give it your best. Similarly, when someone puts something in front of you and says, “Do what you do, and get it to me by next week,” you just do it, and it’s pleasant. It’s a way of distracting yourself from the voices, the doubt that inevitably crops up–it always has for me, and I think it does for other artists–that keeps you from moving forward.

MR: How does your songwriting web series function? How does that come together, who chooses what, etc.?

BA: We just did a big project in South By Southwest where we had at our disposal all these extraordinary artists that came in for the festival, and we just asked people that we admired, “Hey, would you consider doing this?” and depending on the artist, they might come in with an idea. For example, when we worked with Turin Brakes, they had come in with a musical idea and some lyrics, and the lead singer has one of these beautifully indistinct voices, where you catch the lyrics but other lyrics you sort of misinterpret or mishear, so we actually had him mumble the lyrics that he had, and I wrote out what I imagined I was hearing, and then toyed with that, and so in a weird way it became sort of an answer song. He had like a chunk of a verse and a chunk of a chorus, and then we ended up blowing out this idea and blowing out his lyrics in a different direction and it was really fun. So that one we had a very specific thing to react to that he’d already brought to the table. With others, they walk in and have absolutely nothing at all. The reason I was at that George Saunders event I mentioned earlier was that we had taken a story that he’d told in an article about a plane crash, and we wrote a song to that the previous year with Ben Sollee and Erin McKeown. So you can really approach it different ways depending on the artist and depending on the artist’s comfort with the unknown and how much they want to have a direction, and how much they want to just feel. I worked with Tracy Bonham on one of these, and she liked to bring a book that she loved and flip through pages and point randomly to words. She did the same thing with the keyboard where she just slammed her hand down on the keyboard and she played this D diminished chord which is where we ended up starting the song from. It ended up not sounding like that, necessarily, but she liked to have that random-number-generator sort of approach to inspiration.

MR: Here’s a concept. In your opinion, where do you draw the line in art between artistic expression and mental illness?

BA: I think I know what you mean. I think artistic expression sort of associates itself with mental illness because you have to let go and say what’s really on your mind…

MR: …which, in our society, of course, is associated with mental illness.

BA: Well, exactly. And if you get a beginning artist in a room and you say “Write me a song about X, Y or Z,” they’ll quickly fall into very worn channels; clichés and ideas that a million people have said, and that’s natural. But artists in a weird way specialize in creativity, and creativity is essentially not saying “no” to things, and allowing all sorts of strangeness and odd ideas and odd phrases and things that do, in many cases, sound suspiciously close to mental illness.

MR: It seems that a lot of people that are really good at expressing themselves artistically have a very active right side of the brain that ends up being so powerful that the left side can’t reel it in. And it is interesting how being mentally or emotionally challenged gets naturally associated with creativity in many cases.

BA: Sure. And beyond which, for a lot of artists we’re rewarding that strange mix of creativity and crazy–“Cray-Cray,” let’s say; and so you put someone in a situation where you say “Hey, this works for you, and the more offbeat you are, and the more odd you are, the better we’re going to reward you and the more seriously we’re going to take you,” because we associate that craziness with truth, with reality, with legitimacy. I think in many ways that’s where you end up with what feels to me like an act. There’s nothing that’s entirely different about the crazy acts of a super well-respected artist; you know, the teased hair, and Spandex pants of your average metal band… It’s just different ways of saying, in some ways, the same thing. Having the ability to do both things is, particularly these days, absolutely essential, and what I struggle with sometimes is the sense that I am supposed to pretend to be the “Crazy artist,” too. I think that I’m genuinely a creative person, but I can’t bring myself to put on an act as far as “I’m SO creative that I can’t talk in normal sentences,” or “I must wear hats from the 1940s in order to express my creativity,” or whatever it is that we’re associating with “hipness” at the moment.

MR: So I suggested the concept of an over-firing right hemisphere of the brain, but where you see creativity abundantly?

BA: Creativity’s essentially the work of figuring out how to be true and honest and to do it in a new way if you can. I reject the idea that it’s like “Oh, the music comes from on high,” and “I was born to this,” and this idea that only certain people have it, and they’re touched by the gods, and they’re crazy and they’re wild. I think it’s self-destructive, and I think it’s rejecting a lot of the beauty that’s out there. I spend all day doing this, so I’m comfortable doing it. If I spent all day fixing toilets, I could fix the crap out of a toilet! [laughs] Pun intended!

MR: [laughs] What’s your advice for new artists?

BA: I would say do the work. You don’t get to just step into the world as a finished artist, as someone who knows their sound and knows how to express that truth within them. You have to figure out what works and what doesn’t work, and what works at one point might change and not work at a different point. And be willing to make an ass out of yourself. So, do the work with the postscript of “Be willing to sound terrible,” and to write bad songs, and to try a project. My last album was an album and a novel; it was a concept project where they were interrelated and the two pieces worked with each other (hopefully), and in talking about it, I said a couple of times to different people that I knew it was something I should do because it scared the hell out of me and I wasn’t sure I could do it. So I would say to a young artist, be willing to fail and to do work that doesn’t feel easy, safe or okay, and take those risks.

MR: Beautiful, nice answer. By the way, can you list some of the artists with whom you’ve worked?

BA: Sure. A.J. Croce, John Wesley Harding, Ollabelle, Ben Sollee, Sean Rowe, Ximena Sariñana, Turin Brakes, Erin McKeown, and more. It’s been a genuine joy and honor to be able to watch each of them in how they approach their work. It’s really inspiring to get a chance to be invited into that personal space and see how they each approach this work, and I take notes.

MR: So you took some cues from them in the process.

BA: Oh yeah. Tracy’s methods really struck me, and each of the artists I’ve worked with. And on my new record, one of the songs is a response song to a song that I wrote with Sean Rowe, because I found him so compelling as an artist. It’s funny, I was saying to someone the other day that he feels, to me, like one of these artists that people 20 years from now are going to say, “Whoa, wait a minute, you wrote a song with Sean Rowe?” And I’ll say, “Yeah, but then he was just this dude workin’ in the stream — nobody knew.” So it’s a real pleasure doing the show and getting the chance to work with those folks.

MR: What’s the future look like for Ben Arthur?

BA: My new album Call And Response comes out October 7th. I’m so excited about it. And I was just thinking yesterday about how I need to start on my new record.

MR: What’s your ultimate goal?

BA: The idea that I had of myself when I was younger didn’t turn out to be what I am, and what my career’s like. It really comes down to the fact that I would like to continue doing the work I’m doing now. I’d like to continue being able to work with people who I admire, and learn from them, continue doing work that scares the hell out of me and that’s fun and engaging. My worst nightmare would be to end up in a place where I’m playing the same song every night and writing the same song every day.

MR: By the way, who are your influences?

BA: I stand of the shoulders of many giants. In other words, I steal from many, many, many people. Recently I’ve been listening to Beck’s new album a lot. A lot of people on the album Call And Response whose songs I’ve responded to are people that I’m obviously touched by: “Atlantic City,” the song by Bruce Springsteen, is one that’s always shaken me, and that was one of the reasons I wanted to try to respond to it. “Walter Reed” is a song by Michael Penn that I just can’t stop listening to, and that was one of the songs I wanted to respond to as well. “The Hymn of Acxiom” by Vienna Teng, off of her new album, is an extraordinary song. That song for me was one of the ones that I got in front of and wanted to write something to, and I couldn’t. It was so good, so breathtakingly beautiful, that I couldn’t even find an angle, so I had to give up. So, I steal from a lot of people. This album Call And Response really documents the people that I want to steal from directly.

MR: [laughs] That’s a nice line. Well, Ben, I think that’s your interview for now!

BA: Cool! What a pleasure to talk with you. Thank you for all the time that you took to hang out with me, and have this all put together. It was such an intelligent conversation. You don’t always get that.

MR: Of course. And I loved talking about mental illness with someone I appreciate it.

BA: Excellent. I charge $90/hour.

Transcribed by Emily Fotis