On My Playlist

01/05/2018

Where there any songs on the album that were a real challenge for you?
"Last week, we finished a song that started seven years ago. Seven years ago, my first daughter had just been born and I was living in Minneapolis, Minnesota. She keeps crying cos her pacifier kept falling out of her mouth. I called her little pacifiers a jammer. Anything was a jammer. That fucking table's a jammer, beer - gimme another jammer.

"This song refused to die. I don't think of songs in the traditional framework because I don't come from the experience of knowing what the fuck to do. I'm sorry that it doesn't have a chorus, I never considered it. Don't care, never did. So they're like 'Ben, will you write a chorus?' Sure, here it goes. 'Pretty good, will you change it?' Fuck y'all, sure. So I did it over a number of years. I thought it was that one that was always going to get away. In the last week, I swear to you, last week my friend was like 'you're Howard Hughes right now, I can't even come over here. You've lost not only perspective, you've lost it. You've lost your fucking mind. I don't know what to tell you right now. Keep on at it, I guess? Or just let it go, dog'.

"Wrapping it up in that question, I wrote this new part, this new lyric. "I found it in a drawer" are the words that I wrote, for a real chorus that these bastards want for songs. I listened to it back and I was like 'it sounds like a damn Dinosaur Jr song'. That's 'In A Jar', that is a Dinosaur Jr song, dildo. So I looked it up online, or looked back at what I have in my collection on iTunes or something and was like I got that EP. So I listen to 'In A Jar' and the song that comes after it is them covering The Cure's 'Just Like Heaven'. So what I did, I'm listening to 'Just Like Heaven' after that and probably staring into the middle distance, not even thinking, I'm singing in the same chordal framework "show me how you do that trick" like J [Mascis], and it fit in my framework. I was like 'this is cool as fuck, this is it, this is the thing I was looking for'. I hit Jason up about it and I showed him me covering J as J. He was like 'I stayed up til four am listening to this and I think it's fucking brilliant and we should just call J and see if he'll do something and I'll write a part'.

"So Jason Lytle, my hero from Grandaddy, wrote a part for J Mascis, my hero from Dinosaur Jr, for a Band Of Horses album, which I happen to be a part of. You could not imagine a more dreamlike experience for someone who is a fan of those bands. It's like playing God! These two girls that I used to be in a band with who are dear friends of mine, I was like 'well I'm going to pull back in some things that didn't work that I tried for these motherfuckers. I'm gonna pull them back in'. It's a shit soup of my friends, but I'm proud as fuck. Yeah it's a cacophony and it's a din of madness, but these are my friends and this is where I come from in my fandom. These are the people I worship and this is a friends party so fuck everything else. So I finished that shit last week and that's the end of that question.


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