CHARACTER STUDIES
Singer-Songwriter Ben Arthur comes back home to Virginia with a new novel and album
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Published: September12, 2012 http://www2.the-burg.com/entertainment/2012/sep/18
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| THE WRITE STUFF: Ben Arthur’s new album is intimately intertwined with his new novel. |
Writing
and recording an album is, almost by definition, no easy task, particularly if,
like Ben Arthur, you happen to be a serious singer-songwriter bent on capturing
the ephemeral essence of emotional turmoil in poetic verse. Penning a novel
that aims to do the same is no walk in the park either. Combining the two, so
that one mirrors, accents, and/or complements the other, raises the endeavor to
an entirely new level of complexity. And yet that's exactly what Arthur, a
Virginia native who moved to NYC in 1999, set out to accomplish three years ago
with his newly released If You Look For
My Heart, his sixth album and second book.
"I wanted each to stand on its
own," says Arthur. "I want people to be able to engage with either of
those pieces and not feel like they're missing out anything because they
haven't read the novel or heard the album. But, if someone brings them
together, they should each change the other so that the narrative can unfold it
in different ways."
Arthur, who's playing house concerts in
Richmond and Roanoke on September 14th and 18th before returning to
Charlottesville for a gig at the Garage on September 19th, grew up in
Harrisonburg, where he was drawn into a rootsy music scene that would go on to
spawn Old Crow Medicine Show and the Hackensaw Boys. In fact, Arthur has fond
memories of gigging with Hackensaw Boys co-founders Robert St. Ours and David
Sickman.
"I've known David forever and I'm a
big admirer of his work. I used to do shows with him every other week back when
he was an indie rocker, sensitive guy with an electric guitar. And Bobby St.
Ours was my main musical collaborator when we were in high school."
At the same time, Arthur was being
unwittingly introduced to a style of music that would come to play a big role
in the sound he would begin to develop when he arrived in Charlottesville in
1991. "My mom lives out in Lexington County, and she would take my brother
and I to picking parties, which, by the way, we thought were really boring. I
had no interest in that music whatsoever. But I did get to see and meet plenty
of great bluegrass musicians like Rooster Ruley, who i played with a few times,
and Danny Knicely, who played mandolin on my third album. So, yeah, a lot of
the bluegrass was happening around me, but it wasn't something that I was
particularly drawn to until I got a little older."
Arthur's Amercana roots aren't
immediately apparent on If You Look For
My Heart. The disc opens, much like a novel, with a "Prelude," a
short, melancholy, vaguely orchestral instrumental that leads into the waltzing
title track, a subdued, foreboding ballad underpinned by spare acoustic guitar
and dark piano chordings. "If you look for my heart/You will find
it/Hollow and cold/I hope you don't mind it," Arthur begins in a near
whisper reminiscent of Leonard Cohen. As the drums make their entrance,
Arthur's voice gains some strength, the air of defeat gives way to something
close to defiance, and a character sketch of someone damaged by the vagaries of
romance emerges.
But Arthur quickly moves in a brighter
direction with the deceptively upbeat roots rocker "So Far," a
ringing anthem with a sturdy backbeat that carries with it the seeds of a happy
ending. "So far, I want to spend I want to spend my whole life with you/So
far, and all the days before that too," Arthur sings with something
resembling the hope that, despite various complications, he's at least wanting
to commit. And some old-time banjo arrives to take Arthur all the way back into
Hackensaw terrain, as his old pal Bobby St. Ours sings a classic rambling tale
of a restless soul who's gotta be "movin' on."
Elsewhere, on “Desolate,” fellow NYC
singer-songwriter Rachel Yamagata takes center stage for a loungey, longing
torch song that lives up to its title. And, while most of the rest of the album
sticks to the Americana side of the tracks, Arthur takes a major left turn with
“Love Your Enemy,” and ominous hip-pop tune outfitted with distorted guitars
and an artful rap by the underground hip-hop artist Aesop Rock. “You’ve got to
kill your enemy/Kill him as you kill yourself,” Arthur croons menacingly once
Aesop is done rhyming.
Arthur, who remembers arriving in
Charlottesville just weeks before the Dave Matthews Band played their first
show, has always embraced a certain eclecticism. Indeed, along with Yamagata
and Aesop Rock, he’s collaborated with artists as diverse as DMB members Boyd
Tinsley and Tim Reynolds, hip-hop DJ Big Whiz, and American Music Club frontman
Mark Eitzel. But there’s clearly a defined method to Arthur’s
mild madness on If You Look For My Heart,
and he’s the first to admit that it has everything to do with the novel, a tale
of three characters trying and failing to make romantic connections that
includes references to Aesop Rock and a scene in which Yamagata performs
“Desolate” at a club.
“I tend to write in a lot of different
styles,” Arthur explains. “And I try to keep the best ones, regardless of the
genre. In this case, I was conscious about using the songs that worked best
with the book. In fact, in some ways the book pushed me in even more eclectic
directions that maybe I normally would have gone. Having the songs tied into
the narrative meant that they couldn't really all be the same kinds of. At
least, that's how it felt to me. I mean, the songs couldn't really be about me because
they’re really meant to reflect the feelings and experiences of the characters
in the novel. And there were things I was doing in the book and in the songs
that morphed as I tied them together and soldered pieces where they needed to
fit.”
A stroke of good fortune — namely,
the advent of multi-media eBooks – gave Arthur the opportunity to literally tie
the album and novel together, by embedding songs at various points in the
narrative. “The eBook is really the purest marriage of the project because you
flip a page and there will be a song you can listen to as you continue to
read,” Arthur explains. “The songs are in a different order in the narrative
than they are on the album because I felt they needed to be sequenced different
in the book than on the album. It's a fun thing to see because when I started
this project we didn't have eBooks that had multi-media elements. It was really
only in the last two years that I realized we could actually do this together
as a single coherent piece. At the same time, ideally you should be able to
read the book on its own or listen to the album on its own. Or you can put the
album on as you're reading the book or put them together however you want.”
