A Conversation with Lord Huron’s Ben Schneider – HuffPost 10.23.12
Mike Ragogna: How are you, sir?
Ben Schneider: I’m doing well. How about yourself?
MR: I’m doing fine. I want to start this off by telling you that when I got your album, Lonesome Dreams, the packaging was so beautiful I just couldn’t wait to listen to it.
BS: It’s good to hear that that had an impact on you. That’s really great.
MR: Then I listened to the album and I admit it, I was floored. Would you walk me through the history of Ben Schneider and Lord Huron?
BS: Sure. I actually went to school to study visual arts, and somehow made my way out to LA, where I was pursuing a career in painting, but it wasn’t really panning out the way I foresaw. So, I went back to making music, which I’d been doing since I was young — incorporating it into a lot of my art projects — but it was always kind of secondary. I went on vacation by the lake up in Michigan, where I’m from, and I recorded a few songs. I just self-released them. I handed them out at festivals and online, and things picked up. I’ve been on the road and recording music ever since.
MR: By the way, are these your paintings on the CD booklet?
BS: Yeah, they’re kind of a mixture of paintings and photo collage that I’ve been working on in the computer.
MR: It’s a gorgeous package, and that reflects the music well. What brought you to this sound?
BS: I’ve always been really into American folk music, which I think is at the core of this music. But in addition to that, I’ve long had an interest in world music, movie music, and all kinds of stuff from all over the world. I’ve always had a habit of going to record stores and buying weird, exotic albums just based on the covers. I think that stuff has really found its way into Lord Huron. It’s kind of the spice that I add to the American stew I guess.
MR: What’s your creative process like?
BS: Like you were mentioning about the visuals before, that’s actually a big part of how I work on the songs. I usually develop the visuals in tandem with the music. So sometimes I’ll start on a guitar, or with the lyrics, more traditionally, but sometimes, I’ll start more with just an image in mind, and just try to recreate that image sonically as best I can. It might sound a little strange, but it’s just a way for me to wrap my head around things, since I’m so used to thinking visually. You can kind of get an idea for a space and a story, and try to create it with sound.
MR: Let talk about your single, “Time To Run,” and the making of the video.
BS: With the whole album, I kind of started with this idea in mind that it would be all these Western tales, or frontier stories. So continuing that in the video, we made this old style, Technicolor western short film. It follows the story of the song, but in a fun, stylized way, which I think is a theme throughout the record.
MR: To me, this is like a big song cycle, with songs blending seamlessly into one another. You’ve created a tapestry.
BS: Yes. I guess I think of it as one box of work. The idea of the album is kind of starting to drift away in the internet age, but I really wanted to get back to that because I think it’s a really strong way to present a group of songs.
MR: The hard thing will be when you put your greatest hits out.
BS: (laughs) We’ll see if we ever get there.
MR: Do you listen to some of your contemporaries like Bon Iver and Fleet Foxes?
BS: Yeah. I wasn’t too familiar with a lot of that stuff when I first started the project, but we got a lot of comparisons, so I checked it out a little more and got deeper into their stuff. There is some really great music being made right now. I definitely understand people’s comparisons. In an ideal world people would listen without any preconceived notions or anything like that, but it’s very flattering to hear that it reminds people of this great music.
MR: As you were working on this project, I can’t imagine you were focusing on anything else in your life.
BS: Yeah, it was pretty consuming. We were on the road so much last year, but I would work on it whenever I could when I was home, or even on the road when I could. Once our tour schedule kind of petered out I really took some time, went back up to Michigan and really dug into it. I spent a lot of time on the lyrics, so I’m glad you recognized those. It was definitely a labor of love — a real intense creative process, but really rewarding.
MR: You talked about your Americana influence before, and one of your songs, “The Ghost On The Shore,” reminds me of kind of “Ghost Riders In The Sky.”
BS: Yeah, absolutely. The Sons Of The Pioneers version of that song is a favorite of mine, and I’ve always been really drawn to stories like that — creepy, Americana stories have always really drawn me in.
MR: So, “The Ghost On The Shore.” Give us the tour.
BS: That’s one that I wrote while I was in Michigan during the winter. I was watching the big freighters go by out on the middle of Lake Huron, and I just got to thinking about the lives of the people that work on those boats. It can be really creepy in Northern Michigan at that time of year. It’s beautiful, but it’s very dark, and there is a certain mystical quality up there that’s hard to define. I was just kind of getting into that mood, and that’s the song that came out.
MR: One of my favorite things is to take the ferry across the lakes.
BS: Oh yeah, it’s just beautiful up there, and it’s got a feeling like no other place I’ve ever been to.
MR: Though, I’ve never had an adventure like on the sailboat that you have here on the back cover.
BS: (laughs)
MR: For this album, are there things that are happening — adventures in your real life — that are making their way into these songs? Are these songs related to personal events or things that have happened to you?
BS: Yeah, absolutely. It’s all based either on my own life or the lives of people close to me. I’m just kind of looking at it through this frontier story lens, but it really does all come from a very personal place. A lot of it is just from traveling around the last couple of years. I’ve been on the move for a while, so a lot of it comes from that.
MR: Something I found interesting about Lonesome Dreams is that most albums feel like the kind of wind down at the end, but yours gets this burst of topical energy.
BS: We kind of wanted it to feel almost like it could keep looping, or go on forever, almost like you’re just getting a little piece of somebody’s life on this record. But you can imagine how they’ll keep going and having more and more experiences. I didn’t necessarily want to feel like it was reaching a conclusion so much as riding off into the sunset to the next adventure.
MR: What do we need to know about Ben Schneider? About Lord Huron?
BS: Not a whole lot. I’m going to try to be sticking around as long as I can, keep hitting the road and writing songs. Hopefully, I’ll be around for a while, making music.
MR: Do you have a goal of where you want to see yourself in a couple of years?
BS: I try not to think too much about that. I’m just hoping to keep myself satisfied creatively, and hopefully the fans appreciate it too. Who knows where it’s going to take me, but I’m just going to keep true to what I want to do.
MR: What advice do you have for new artists?
BS: Man, it’s really tough to answer that because it’s such a mercurial kind of thing. The way it happened for us was so sudden and strange. I would just say make what you want to make, and get it out there in as many ways as you can. Hopefully, someone will grab onto it, but it’s really about using the tools that are at hand. I had to learn a bit about the way things work on the internet at the beginning there, but I think if you can familiarize yourself with those tools as much as possible, and try to get your music out there as much as possible, I think that’s really important. The most important thing is definitely just making sure your craft is as good as it can be. I think some people focus too much on the promotional end, and maybe don’t spend enough time on the content. You want to get it out there and make things happen fast, but you’ve got to have a good product to begin with. You have to get your vision clear before you try to do anything. You have to know what you’re trying to do and what you’re trying to communicate to people, and I think that’s one of the reasons it took so long to finish this record. We wanted to make sure we were making as clear a statement as we could.
MR: I’m honored to have talked to you Ben. All hail Lord Huron!
BS: I’m honored as well. Thanks for taking the time.
MR: Thank you. I wish you all the best.
Transcribed by Ryan Gaffney