A Conversation with Plan B (Ben Drew) – HuffPost 5.11.11
Mike Ragogna: Ben, you define your new album The Defamtion of Stickland Banks as a culmination of films for the blind.
Ben Drew: Yeah, that’s right. It’s a concept story from start to finish, so each song is a scene in a film. It obviously has no images in terms of when you’re listening to the album, it’s just music. But I tried to make the storytelling really visual. If you want to look for a story within this album there is one, whereas with other albums, it’s generally just a collection of songs. My whole career, my angle, has been telling stories.
MR: Including when your influence was more on rap?
BD: Yeah. Who Needs Actions When You Got Words? was my first album and it was hip-hop. That was a collection of short stories in one album, and with this new one, the whole album is just one story. Even though the first album was mostly hip-hop, I sang a little bit on the hooks, but it sounds completely different from this album, which is a soul album with elements of hip-hop. But it’s a Plan B record because it’s telling a story, and I think that’s the most important thing about me – I’m going to constantly cross genres because I have the ability to do so. I get bored of just making the same style of music. But the one thread through it all is that I am like a film director like Cameron Pinot, except I’m doing it with music.
MR: Speaking of films, you starred opposite Michael Caine in the film Harry Brown.
BD: Yeah. I did a film called Adulthood before that, and that was my first role in a feature film. After that one I did Harry Brown.
MR: And you played the character Noel Winters.
BD: I did, yeah. He’s a nasty piece of work.
MR: He is! (laughs) So, the way you sing on this album is pretty soulful, and you include retro strings and orchestrations that provide cinematic sweeps. When you’re singing, do you see “scenes” in your head?
BD: Yeah. When I wrote certain parts of certain songs like “Welcome To Hell” for example. I needed a song for Strickland Banks, as the main character of this film, to represent his first day in jail. I needed a song that was him going from the courts and arriving at his first day in jail, and I didn’t have anything. Then the title “Welcome To Hell” popped into my head because arriving in prison would be hell, and he is a famous guy, so everybody’s gonna want a piece of him. So, that title felt appropriate because all of the inmates would be excited that this guy was coming to jail. They would welcome him into this hell. Once I had that title, and I knew what part of the story the song would be able to flow in, I wrote it very quickly, and it was like that for the rest of the songs. As soon as I knew what part of the story it was, I had a title for the song.
MR: Can you tell me more about the process of what went into recording this album?
BD: I wanted it to sound like the Pilooski edit of a song called “Beggin'” by Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons. I don’t know if the song made it over the shores, but 679 Records, the label that signed me, did a remix of a song by that group with Pilooski. It got really big in the clubs and really revitalized the song to the point where people my age knew the song because I never knew about it before that. Then a group called Madcon from Denmark covered it and had a massive #1 in the UK and in Europe with it. Again, I don’t know if that happened over in the U.S., but the point is they had taken an old song that was recorded in mono and revamped it and remixed it for now, which meant it had that bottom end that old Motown soul music didn’t have back in the day. The drums were really set far back, whereas the drums in modern music are upfront and you can feel the bass. That’s what I wanted this album to be, I wanted it to have a feeling of nostalgia with it to sound like an old record that had been revamped for now.
So, we tried to make the stuff that we were recording sound as if it were recorded back in the day. We did that using old string reverbs and distortions. There’s an overdrive distortion on Logic, the standard distortion drive that comes with the software, and we just literally put a little bit of that over every stem. That, mixed with reverb and the right EQ’s, gives it that old sound, and it’s not as easy as it sounds, either! I wrote most of the songs on my acoustic guitar at home, and then went into the studio and recorded them with my band. Then Paul Wentworth, the guy I brought the demos to, created the sound of this album. He showed me what to do and what tricks to use to make the record sound like this. He actually ended up producing four of the most important songs on the album: “Writing’s On The Wall,” “Welcome To Hell,” “Stay Too Long,” and “Praying.” He was the catalyst for my work after that. After those songs, I went on and did the rest of the songs alone. But we needed him to give us that initial help, and the strings, which were done by Sally Herbert who does a lot of the Radiohead strings, obviously were done to compliment what we had already done. It was great because when other people came in and heard the sound that we were going for, it inspired their input and only enhanced the final product of the songs. When you talk about the strings feeling cinematic or the brass feeling like it was from an older era, a lot of that was me saying, “Yes, I like this…no, I don’t like this.” But the other side of it was the people who were helping us hearing the music and, I guess, loving it to the point that their additions just complimented what we had already done. Yeah, with this album, everything just kinda came together, and I was watching over the process the whole time so I was never gonna let this album fail.
MR: Are there any guests on the album?
BD: I don’t have any guests, no. I felt it was very important not to rely on guest artists.
MR: That’s great because the trend seem to be whoever gets the biggest tally of famous guests wins.
BD: Well, the problem with a lot of artists now is that they just get shoved down your throat, they’re just over-promoted. They have a music video, and then you see footage of them performing and you think, “Wow, this person is really talented!” But then you just get sick of them because you are inundated with posters and crap everywhere, and you don’t care if they’re talented anymore because you know that there’s a machine behind them just shoving them down your throat. Don’t get me wrong, I need that initial promotion and for those doors to be opened in order to help me play to the masses. But once you’ve done that, it has to be the masses’ choice if they want to listen to you and tell their friends about you. I much prefer that. I don’t want to be force-fed into people’s lives, I want them to come looking for me, and it was very important with this album that I didn’t rely on anyone else’s profile to help me sell records. I’ve always felt very uncomfortable about that. I made myself in this world and I don’t want or need anyone else to say that they gave me a leg up, you know?
MR: I know that this is kind of contrary to what we were just talking about, but what was it like performing “I Guess That’s Why They Call It The Blues” with Elton John on the BBC’sElectric Proms?
BD: It was surreal, man! I was quite nervous. We did a soundcheck and I was taking quite a while to get the sound the way that I wanted it. I wasn’t annoying anyone, but I felt like I was. I wanted to get up there and do the sound check and then just say, “See you later guys,” but I am very particular about how I have my sound when I’m onstage. So, it was great, but I wasn’t 100% happy with my sound, and that’s the thing with me. If I don’t perform the way I want, it always taints the experience. I felt like I could have done better that night because I’d done better in soundcheck when I did that song. Having said that, I don’t think I embarrassed myself or anything. The show was okay. But being on the stage with Elton John…that guy has been, like, a massive, massive icon since I was a little kid. He’s like musical royalty, so for him to like your music and invite you up on stage? It’s like, I don’t know. Damn! It’s the most surreal, strangest thing in the world. Then you meet him and he’s just a normal guy. He’s as normal as anyone else and very humble. It’s strange when you get to this position and you meet celebrities and you realize that it’s just a bunch of normal people who other people treat differently and put up on a pedestal, and I think that’s sometimes what people do to me. They meet me and they can’t even talk to me. (laughs) They don’t know what to say and they get all nervous and start having panic attacks and they just don’t realize that I’m just a normal person. But it’s really all about how you perceive it.
MR: What advice do you have for new artists?
BD: Never follow money! Because music is not about the money. And if that’s the reason you’re in this, me and the rest of the world will see through it and you won’t get the respect you wanted. This isn’t a game to me, this is my life…I live for this. I mean, money is something we all need, I won’t be a hypocrite and say that I don’t need it, but that’s not why you should do this. And the number one thing, to me, is to be happy about the things that I’m doing to earn that money, because if not, I might as well go and be a prostitute and earn my money like that.
Transcribed by Evan Tyrone Martin