Features

Ben Bostick: The Daily Vault Interview (2025)

by Jason Warburg

The word “epiphany” came up a lot during my second interview with Ben Bostick—for good reason.

Until this year, Bostick and his released work—five albums and an EP over the course of the past dozen years—would have fit neatly under the umbrella label of “Americana singer-songwriter.” While there’s always been a playful edge to his “outsider country” songs (think Johnny Cash or, more recently Chris Stapleton), they’re superbly crafted, full of memorable lines, rhymes and melodic hooks.

With his third LP Among The Faceless Crowd, though, things took a turn as he made an entirely acoustic album that mostly left the punchlines on the cutting room floor as his characters encountered situations that were no laughing matter. Fourth album Grown-Up Love then borrowed only the basic sonic framework of Americana for what was an intensely personal singer-songwriter album, crafted in the wake of his young daughter being diagnosed with a rare genetic disorder, Rett Syndrome.

The last time Ben and I spoke on the record was when Grown-Up Love came out back in August 2021. In the interim he circled back to familiar ground to produce The Rascal Is Back, an extra playful, extra catchy set of Americana tunes that has since become his most-listened-to-album on streaming services. And yet, making it did not scratch his creative itch; it felt like a step, if not backwards, then sideways—certainly not forward. Which led him to consider trying something completely different.

That epiphany—plus a run-in with AI, described below—resulted in the completely new direction heard on his new album Become Other, whose main source of inspiration was not Johnny Cash, but Beethoven. You couldn’t get much further musically from snappy four-minute Americana tunes than a long-form orchestral piece composed and performed mostly on synthesizer. But that’s exactly what Bostick has done, crafting a vivid, boldly imaginative and thoroughly immersive piece that makes you feel as though you’re watching an operatic drama unfold onstage at an avant-garde theater.

This creative leap of course queues up a range of questions. Will Bostick’s existing audience follow him across the musical border into this completely new territory? Will a new audience more interested in this sort of bracingly experimental work be able to find him? And finally, in an era when streaming pays artists fractions of pennies and AI threatens to make human composers obsolete, do any of those considerations matter? In some ways, there has never been a better time to say “I’m just going to follow my muse”—both because there’s little incentive to do otherwise, and because a muse is one thing AI will never have.

Become Other—an album that Bostick describes as “a radical experiment in meaning”—is challenging, fascinating, and full of both imagination and heart, and our conversation was all of that, too. From meeting the challenges of AI, to taking inspiration from William Blake, to trying to make your 14-year-old self flip out, we covered a lot of ground.

THE DAILY VAULT: Become Other represents a real departure for you creatively. Was there a specific moment when you said to yourself, “I need to change what I’m doing and try something completely different?” And what led up to that moment?

BEN BOSTICK: The simple answer is lots of stuff led up to that moment, positive and negative. Positive, meaning things that drew me here, and negative, meaning things that pushed me away from the Americana genre.

The main impetus behind it was after I made the last record, The Rascal Is Back, I just felt like the process had been unfulfilling. I had the process down, I had a great group of musicians, I knew how to write these kinds of songs... but at the end it was just like, okay, I did it again. And as an artist I like the feeling of stretching. Immediately after that project I was thinking maybe I should do something different for the next record, but I had no idea what it would be.

Shortly after that my buddy from LA sent me a song that he created with AI. He’s not a musician. He’s a music fan, but in no way musically inclined. And I was listening to it on my phone when my wife came in the room and she said, “Wow, who is that? I love her voice.”

And I said “Oh, shit.”

It was interesting because she was right—this song sounded good. The voice sounded good and the construction of the song was exactly how those kinds of songs were done. It was sort of a pop-Americana genre with acoustic guitars and a girl singing along with it. The lyrics made sense as much as pop-Americana stuff makes sense. And it sounded great and it felt like a real watershed moment to me, as a writer who laborers in the Americana field.

Another thing that happened around the same time was that I went to a Folk Alliance conference. Folk Alliance is a loose affiliation of folk music connoisseurs—performers, radio DJs, record labels—and they all get together for a conference regionally across America yearly. They happened to have a conference in the city where my sister lives, and I said, “Why not? Go.” And I heard there that AI had won one of the major lyric writing contests. It’s like “Wow!” The person who won didn’t say so until after, of course, that they had used AI-generated lyrics.

So those two things got me thinking, “Okay, AI is pretty good at this, and it’s just getting started, clearly. What is it not good at?” And what I thought was that AI is not good at meaning. By definition, it produces facsimiles of meaning, in both a musical sense and a lyrical sense. It’s not “Oh, man, this is from my heart.” For a casual music fan, though, there is no difference—a lot of times you just hear a beat and a catchy lyric, and that’s enough.

What I then decided to do was to embark on a radical experiment of meaning, to see if I could create something so packed with meaning that I can’t imagine how you would prompt AI to create it. That’s what was in my mind when I started this project.

The negative thing that had already been sort of been pushing me away from Americana is the fact that I had less of a personal connection with the genre, over the last few years especially. I feel like it was becoming more like playing cowboy than any sort of true expression of my current situation, especially after my daughter Carmelo was diagnosed with Rett Syndrome.

It just felt silly to be going to these big hospitals and talking about experimental medicine, with my iPhone and my Subaru and everything, and then playing around with the tropes of country music. What I and my family were going through felt so detached from the tropes of the genre. With any popular genre, as a writer in the genre, what you are doing is creatively rearranging cliches of that genre. And in that moment I felt no connection to those tropes and cliches, so I wanted to go somewhere completely different.

To bring it even further back, I was not always an Americana artist. Before my foray into Americana, I was in all kinds of bands and interested in all kinds of music. Before I started playing guitar, my first instrument was the violin. And after I picked up the guitar, I was in rock bands, r&b bands, and funk bands, and was listening to classical music and jazz.

When I was living in Los Angeles [in the 2010s], I found a niche in Americana that allowed me to make a living playing in country bars and making records, where I could do it full time. For the last almost decade, it has been just one small part of my musical self on display, and I felt like it was enough time that I could showcase some other things that I like to do.

As much as I toyed with releasing Become Other under an alias, I felt like I don’t have time to have two versions of myself, as an independent artist especially. And what’s the point? I have a small core audience of people who are interested in my music. Some people will be turned off by this and I don’t really care… I’m just going to do what I feel in the moment. Maybe the essence of what I bring to the table will be the through line that connects it to my previous work… or not.

That’s the whole hurricane of stuff that was in my head when I started thinking about this project.

Several threads that you talked about I want to pick up later, but let’s start by digging into the music. The album opens with a breath, which to me symbolized the first inhale after birth. Then it moves into these really challenging elements—ominous synths and metallic percussion and dramatic orchestral elements. And then when the vocals come in, they have a hip hop cadence. It’s a long way from Americana. Both the opening sequence, and the album as a whole, feel like a declaration of artistic independence.

Without a doubt. One of the things that I consciously was doing was making an album about metamorphosis, that is very different from my previous output. You’re exactly right, my intention with that breath was the breath of life, the first breath. Then this sort of stacked harmony growing is like the emergence or birth of a person.

But the birth is into a terrible place, a place where the rhythm is uncertain, the harmony is uncertain. Everything is twisty and a sonic representation of the tangle, which is of course the name of that first track and the location where the protagonist of the record is trapped.

And what drew you to that style and approach for this album, which is very theatrical and orchestral and often dark and always dramatic?

In short, Beethoven.

Really!

Beethoven steered me towards that. He’s my lifelong obsession as a musician. From before I can remember I’ve been fascinated with Beethoven, especially the symphonies—three, five and nine, to call out a few, which all have the same arc as this record. Classical theorists call it the heroic period of Beethoven, where his pieces go from this dark, tumultuous stage and open up into a glorious, triumphant place at the end. This record is very much inspired by Beethoven. We can get into many more details about the construction of it and Beethoven's heroic style.

I didn’t want to write an instrumental piece, though, so I decided to put words with it. As an English major, I had to. [laughter]

When your first couple of albums came out you described their genre as “outsider country,” which makes me think of Johnny Cash and Merle Haggard and people like that. And what I’m appreciating right now is that Cash and Haggard are part of the same universe as Beethoven—it’s just that it’s a very big universe.

Without a doubt. Yeah, I totally agree. There’s a certain ethos of independence that runs through all of these figures.

Yes! Speaking of influences, in the hip hop segments I maybe inevitably heard a hint of Hamilton. Are you a fan?

Absolutely. Because of having kids, I’m actually most familiar with Moana [whose songs were composed by Hamilton composer Lin-Manuel Miranda]. I’ve heard that soundtrack and watched that movie so many times that I think it’s probably seeped into my subconscious.

But I do admire the way that Lin-Manuel Miranda is able to use word play in a way that doesn’t just sound clever. A lot of times word play just sounds cool; as much as I love Jay-Z and his beats, a lot of times when you try to figure out a through-line in his lyrics, it’s hard to locate any through-line besides a string of really clever rhymes. But Lin-Manuel Miranda is able to do that in a dramatic form, in a way that advances a narrative and a story. It’s incredible.

I should add another thing that’s related to this—my wife and I started going to the opera a few years ago, which was a big eye-opener to me. I’ve always been interested in opera, but never really been familiar with it in any serious way. And we decided to go because my wife is in fashion, so she’s interested in the pageantry and the costuming and the scenery and all that. I’m interested in the music, so it’s a perfect date night-type thing. I’ve been getting to see these grand operas and getting into the construction of the big Wagner pieces. We’ve seen three of the four Wagner ring cycle operas now, and the way that he strings together musical ideas is amazing, and the drama is fascinating as well.

That definitely fed into this sort of dramatic, over-the-top orchestral thing.

I will say this. Opera doesn’t make sense to just listen to, because it is a play. The music is all in service of what’s happening on the stage. It’s totally different when you are there and it’s strangely emotional. It’s one of those weird things where the plots are almost always ridiculous, and the words are ridiculous, but for some reason when everything comes together, you just find yourself tearing up in the middle of this ridiculous scene. It’s been a real eye-opener for me. 

On a related subject: on your Americana albums, it sometimes feels like you’re playing a character, with larger-than-life traits and wink-at-the-audience humor. And there was an element of theater in the way you created those characters, and that theatricality felt like it was an important part of Become Other.

Yes, definitely, from the beginning. As you noted in your review of the My Country EP, it’s making light fun of a genre I love—that’s how I was thinking about it at the time. People take that record very seriously. I look at my YouTube comments sometimes, and I’m like, “Oh, interesting.” [laughter] But yes, there’s an element of theatricality to country music.

One of the things that I really love about especially outsider country music is the aspect where lyrically, nothing is off limits—there are country songs about everything. And it doesn’t have to be a novelty song to be funny—it’s one of the only genres where you can have a funny song that’s not a novelty song.

I always loved that theatricality, and it’s embedded in Become Other—a much more flamboyant theatricality.

At times in Become Other, you adopt or create different voices for what feel like different characters. At the same time, in the third movement, at one point you declare “It’s all me.” Talk about that.

The big, overarching concept of this record is that it’s a psychological myth. That’s how I picture where the protagonist is—he’s trapped in this place called The Tangle, which is a sort of psychological dungeon where he can’t move and he’s trapped and sees no way out. It’s all darkness and there’s nothing he can do about it. And the big epiphany is that The Tangle is of his own creation; The Tangle is the world as he was looking at it.

This is all sort of inspired by William Blake’s concept of four-fold vision. He’s a poet from the turn of the 18th century—around 1790ish, French Revolution era, but in England. He was almost ignored in his times but became hugely popular during the psychedelic era. He’s the person who said “If the doors of perception were cleansed everything would appear to man as it is, Infinite.”

Jim Morrison, of course, and Aldous Huxley before him, were inspired by William Blake. But in addition to being a quotable psychedelic poet, he had a concept of fourfold vision where he could see everything in four different realms simultaneously. And what exactly those realms are, is very vague in his poetry. But taking that concept into Become Other, the concept is that everything, emotionally, is present everywhere, all at once. And the real epiphany is to be able to see that, to see that you were always in The Tangle and you were always capable of being in a world without measure, depending on how you look at things.

The album is broken into four movements with three sections in each. I’m wondering, did the sections develop individually and then get pieced together? Were you working from some sort of road map, or was it just flowing?

It was all worked out over a long period of precogitation. It was not an easy thing to think about structuring. It took me a long time to figure out how to string this thing together.

I first thought about the overall arc going from the darkness to the light. And then I decided to break it into four movements, like a symphony, so that I had signposts along the way to organize it, as well as sort of copying this Beethovian model of the heroic symphony. And then I decided to employ, or pseudo-employ, a structure called sonata form, which is a classical era structure. Basically, you introduce one theme instrumentally, then another theme, and then in the end, sort of combine them.

If you notice, for example in the first movement, “The Tangle” is the first section or song, and then you have “Heavy Heart” is the second section or song and then the third is “Star-Crossed.” And although it’s harder to hear musically, “Star-Crossed” is really a combination of both of the previous two songs.

It gets into what are subliminal things for most listeners—you can sort of tell there’s something connected here, but you can’t tell what. But through different musical processes which I won’t get into, there are ways to make a major melody minor or to invert a melody and to keep a sort of musical through-line going and combine things in a familiar but novel way. That’s musically what my goal was with especially the first two movements. The third movement was more through-composed within a dramatic arc. I knew where I wanted the sort of big climax to happen, and I knew after the climax there needed to be a place where it comes back down. You can’t maintain a climax for a full 10 minutes. All of those considerations were in there.

Their composition was pretty rigorous, I suppose, compared to writing a country song. I was forced by the process to go back to pen and paper, making notes on staff paper to try to work out a lot of these ideas. It was too much to keep in your head all at one time. Writing things down, I was working with motives, the tiny musical fragments that classical composers work with. For example, in Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, we’re all familiar with the [singing] bum-bum-bum-BUM. The would be the motive out of which Beethoven constructs the rest of that movement. And if you go back and listen to it, you’ll notice that the entire first movement is just permutations of that rhythm, and the next thing is [sings variation of the motive] a sequence down, and then the next thing here is [sings more variations] for the entire movement.

I was experimenting with this method of composition. You use these tiny fragments of musical ideas, not even big enough to be called a melody, just a snippet or a brick that you build a house with. Piggybacking on that, there’s another concept that people credit to Ricard Wagner, the opera composer, of applying these different motives to different characters or themes in a dramatic structure—not unlike a film score where you’ll hear a certain musical theme associated with a character. Every time Batman comes on screen, you hear a certain thing or every time the Joker comes on, you hear a certain thing.

Those concepts became the building blocks for all the music in Become Other. I have a spreadsheet of my motives—what represents what. And I have dichotomous motives, which are literally like—for “The Tangle,” you have a certain motive, which is [sings it]. You hear it over and over, and then there’s a dichotomous motive for “World Without Measure,” which is an altered version of that same motive.

It’s constructed in such a way that it’s not meant to be studied, it’s meant to all sink in subliminally where you hear these certain things that connect to ideas, that hopefully tell the story in a more powerful way than just the lyrics would, or just mood music behind the lyrics.

That feels very much in the symphony / opera tradition of storytelling through music—you have lyrics too in opera, but the music also tells the story.

Sure. And Lin-Manuel Miranda is a master at telling the story both lyrically and musically.

When you listen to a lot of musicals, there are really only like a couple of songs that are then altered and reframed throughout the course of the musical—but unless you really listen, it sounds like they’re completely different songs. In the score of these musicals, too, they’re just taking snippets of the songs and sort of twisting them in a way to fit the dramatic underscore, which is amazing.

I think it’s like magic, this sort of musical thing—it’s amazing that people ever thought of it.

When you were working on it, was your conception of it that you were writing a symphony? Or were you writing a musical? I ask because so much of the time, I was visualizing action taking place on a stage.

Yes. I was really sort of utilizing symphonic and operatic techniques to write a narrative, like a dreaded drama. It’s not a symphony… but because it is just an auditory phenomenon, it sort of is a symphony. Really the genre that it’s closest to in the classical realm is oratorio. Handel’s Messiah is an oratorio, a work for voice and orchestra that tells a story.

The narrative element is not this happens and this happens and this happens. It’s more of an emotional journey. I can tell you in my head what happens, but it’s not really important that people follow that exact physical narrative to enjoy the work.

The first hint I recall you offering about how different Become Other might be was in your newsletter. You were talking about content versus art and saying that you had no interest in being a content creator; you’re an artist. Your words sent me searching for a metaphor and what I came up with is: Content is something you use to fill a void, like sand. Art is transformational, like turning sand into glass.

Great metaphor. Yeah. It all stems from the AI stuff I was talking about earlier. That, and getting older. I’m 41 years old, seeing midlife now.

The other thing is, why strive for content? There’s nothing rewarding about it. I work with music libraries and supply content to them to make money, but it’s not a way of life; it’s just a gig. And I’m being phased out of it now, because AI is just so good at it… it can create derivative content wonderfully and deliver it fully mixed and break it out into different instruments, and it can do all that without any human input whatsoever.

Art is just different. It’s the transformative thing, it's the communication, it comes from somebody. As I talked about in that newsletter, the definition of art for so long has involved an artist. And now there’s this other category of art which might not include an artist, which is very strange. I don’t know whether to call it art or not, but I know as an artist my duty is to create something that has meaning. It all goes back to meaning to me. And that’s another thing with having a daughter with a disability—doing something not frivolous has become important to me.

I hear that. Another thing that’s come into a lot of conversations I’ve had with musicians is this idea of chasing transcendence. And as a fiction writer, I’m conscious that the act of creating a new story is as close as I’ll ever get to playing God. In my notes on Become Other, I wrote this: “He's created a piece of art that's about the act of creating art and the divine essence of that act, and how the act of creation transforms the artist as well as the art.”

Nail on the head. Yeah, absolutely.

That moment we were talking about earlier of the epiphany is really about becoming an artist, being able to see the world from different angles at the same time—which as a fiction writer is what it’s about when you’re writing characters. Seeing the world from different angles simultaneously is much easier to do when you’re writing than it is when you’re living. As much as you know and are conscious of it, life takes over a lot of times and you find yourself blind to a more detached reality where you can see things more clearly.

That has was definitely in my mind when I was writing, that this is sort of the birth of an artist—the epiphany of being able to see, to open your eyes.

There’s a lyric in the title track that zeroes in on that idea: “In me, the whole world / A new creation is dawning / Silence the heart and be still / And become other.”

That’s it. I can’t really say it better than that.

Part of the essence of art for me is also the exchange between artist and audience. And I was curious because you’ve cultivated an audience that has a certain set of expectations about what Ben Bostick sounds like. What are you hoping that your audience will get out of Become Other?

I don’t know. It might be a completely different audience… I’ve just sort of decided not to care. I hope that people will give it a chance.

There couldn’t be a worse first two minutes of music to draw people in. [laughter] It’s very difficult and demanding immediately. It starts off in the hardest place of the whole album, which is exactly what you’re not supposed to do when you’re thinking about marketing an album. But I was very consciously making a piece of art and not making a piece of marketable content. I’m going to make something that is exactly as it should be and I hope people will give it a chance.

The album feels whole and complete and somewhat separate from everything else you’ve done. Will you try to incorporate pieces of it in your live performances?

I don’t know. It is definitely so composed. To do it live it would be a completely different experience and there are some parts of some songs that are just unrecreatable without using tracks, and I hate using tracks, that’s not my thing. When I perform live, I like to be free and untethered from anything.

So I don’t know if I’ll ever perform it. Also, with this kind of music, and classical music in general, a lot of it is not about the melody and the words themselves, it’s about what you do with them. In classical music, original melodies and rhythms are not a thing. Nobody cares, everybody takes existing melodies, and then it’s about what you do with it. It’s the same in jazz—with jazz, nobody’s like, “Oh, wow, this is a great new, original jazz number.” So much of jazz is about looking at a set of standards and saying, “What can we do with this?”

Become Other is original material, but really, the record is what it is. I’m sure you could take some musicians and they could do stuff with it, but it would be like covering the first movement of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony. It would be weird to do because, it’s not about [sings] bum-bum-bum-BUM, it’s about what Beethoven does with it. That’s sort of how I viewed this album. This manifestation of these ideas is part and parcel of the idea itself.

Listening to the album, I started thinking about artists like David Bowie who refused to be pigeon-holed and kept evolving creatively all the way through. I would imagine that brings a real sense of satisfaction for the artist. It’s challenging commercially, because most people like what they like, and like to hear the same thing again, just a little bit different. One of the funny conversations that I’ve had with progressive rock musicians is about how much progressive rock fans tend to hate it when their artists actually progress. [laughter]

But it feels like it would bring real satisfaction as an artist to just keep growing and learning and using new tools.

Oh yeah, that’s so fun. Music and music technology and poetry, the possibilities are just limitless. So when you’re working within a genre like I have been, you find yourself thinking “Why am I just in this teeny-tiny corner of the galaxy? When I could be out there in space, doing anything, because anything is possible today.”

Fifty years ago, creating something like Become Other would have been insane. You wouldn’t have been able to do it. The technology now and all the orchestral samples make it possible. People have recorded the greatest orchestras in the world with every single possible articulation of the bow from every angle, and now I’m able with a keyboard to go and recreate these amazing orchestral sounds. It doesn’t sound exactly like a real orchestra, which it wasn’t supposed to in this project, but there are people who can make it sound amazing. And 50 years ago you would’ve had to have a million dollars to go and record your orchestra.

With what you can do now with a keyboard and samples, I feel like, yeah, I’m just going to explore.

Awesome. So, I was thinking about the progression of your albums. The first was outsider country. The second turned that idea up to 11. The third was mostly acoustic. And the first three were writing characters, but the fourth was very personal, very singer-songwriter. The Rascal Is Back feels like it combined elements from each of those, but it’s also the only one that feels less like an advance or an evolution, than a summing up. And my question was, is that what drove you to do something so completely different?

In part, yeah, absolutely, The Rascal Is Back just didn’t feel like it was an advance. It felt like familiar water. And of course, when you go on Spotify, it’s my most-listened-to record. [laughter] It’s what people wanted; that is the marketplace—something slightly different, but mostly the same. And I feel like that’s not a bad thing. I’m sure I’ll revisit those same fields and toil in them again—but right now, I just don’t feel like it.

Become Other is me trying to make an album that 14-year-old me would have flipped out over. And 14-year-old me would not have flipped out over The Rascal Is Back. At that age I wanted to have my mind blown by something I couldn’t have imagined. I remember hearing those prog records, I remember hearing The Doors for the first time and “The End” being this 12-minute thing where the music ends and people are screaming and what the hell is going on? It was just mind-blowing as a 13- or 14-year-old. Things like Pink Floyd, when you’re a teenager, it’s just amazing.

I hope with this record some 13- or 14-year-old somewhere is going to put on headphones and go “Wow, I didn’t know music could do this. This is amazing.”

That’s a great image. Do you see yourself continuing to do your live thing with the catalog of music that you've developed, and then over here, with the other part of your musical personality, creating more of these kinds of pieces?

Yeah, my creative life, my musical life has always been somewhat split between my records and my live performances, because most of my live performances are not concerts. Most of the time I’m playing bar gigs and wineries and breweries and weddings and corporate events. A lot of people disdain that kind of music, but I’ve learned more from doing that musically than anything. Like when you get hired for a wedding or corporate event and they request certain songs that you would never learn otherwise, that’s where you learn.

It’s like, okay, I have to do Etta James’ version of “At Last” in a week and you go “Okay, how does she do that?” Because that’s a sound, and I don’t know how to make that sound. And then you have to study it and figure it out and “Wow, she’s super-imposing scales on these chords.” It’s amazing and fascinating to find out these different things. I’ve learned tons from doing these cover gigs.

Also, at these gigs a lot of time when you’re background music, that’s where you improvise. I’m constantly improvising at these gigs on original tunes or covers or real improvisation, where I just start going and see what happens. That’s where a lot of breakthroughs happen. A lot of songs are generated that way, or musical ideas, or you figure out something. I love it. I think live performing in any way, if you view it the right way, is the greatest learning experience you can have as a musician.

How are you planning to approach promoting the album? It feels like maybe it’s such a departure that a departure in terms of how you approach that is in order, too.

Yeah, it’s really going to be an experiment. [laughter] I’m shooting a music video for “Heavy Heart.” My publicist, Bill Benson of Team Claremont, feels like “Heavy Heart” and “Flying High” are the two ones that would work separated from the rest of the record. And I decided that “Heavy Heart” would be an easier video to make, so I’m going to make a video for a separated version of “Heavy Heart.” I have a metal works manufacturer literally manufacturing a huge metal heart on a chain and I told her to make it look like an old artifact he dug out of the earth. I’ll be lugging it around, dragging it around. [laughter]

So that will be one promotional element and then I’ll be working with Bill to see who would be interested in this genre-less, strange thing. He works with a lot of people who are not easily pigeon-holed and he’s a big fan of music that’s not easy to define, so hopefully we’ll be able to find some people who are interested.

As the Internet has exposed, there’s the bulk of music fans, and then a smaller but voracious group of people who like non-mainstream music. We’re hoping to be able to connect with a pocket of people who are like me, who would be interested in hearing something different and classically composed. I think it’s a super interesting realm of composition to combine modern production with classical techniques. And there are people out there who are doing this.

My by-far-favorite modern composer is this guy named Peter Gregson, who is just amazing. He’s a Scottish cellist and composer who is just a master at combining electronics with orchestral instruments in a way that doesn’t sound like what you would think, like a beat behind an orchestra. We’ve heard that done to death. He’s found ways of doing it in live performance as well as in recordings, and it’s just transcendently beautiful.

I’m inspired by people like him who are laborers in similar fields. He’s signed to Deutsche Grammophon, the big classical label, but even with that, he’s still not reaching a huge audience. But there is an audience for people doing interesting things beyond the bounds of any thus-far-named genre. [laughter]

That sounds really intriguing.

I would recommend his album called Patina. It doesn’t get any better—it’ll transport you to a different realm.

Awesome. So, given the theatrical elements of Become Other, and the way I kept visualizing it as I was listening, I’m wondering—if you found a collaborator who wanted to create a musical performance of the piece, would you want to pursue that?

Yes! My dream in the beginning was to create a video that went along with the entire thing, but it’s just cost-prohibitive. It would take somebody forever to do. But that’s still my dream. I think a visual artist could do something amazing with this record, and perhaps someday I’ll find a collaborator to do that with.

In the meantime, as the cliche goes, you can do something either fast, cheap or good. And I don’t have the time to do it cheap and good and I don’t have the money to do it fast and good—and I’m not going to sacrifice the good. So we’re just letting it lay for the time being.

But yeah, if a collaborator came along who had an idea to do it as a live performance, that would be amazing as well. I would love to do that.

The fact that Become Other represents such a big departure makes the last question feel unusually complicated… what’s next?

Oh, man! I have three ideas that I’ll let you in on.

One is, to continue the classical analogy, kind of a chamber piece, written specifically for one person to perform solo, just guitar, vocals and maybe harmonica. Very stripped down, just literally a good performance piece that I could do as a single piece.

Idea number two is a take on a classical form called theme and variations, which is exactly what it sounds like—a composer will take a theme, meaning a sort of simple rendering of an idea, and then do variations on that theme. Bach would write something like 32 variations on one theme, with each variation around two minutes.

My idea is to do an EP where you take one song and then do variations on that song. You would repeat the basic elements of the song but then recreate it in different ways that not only are different iterations of it, but expand the meaning of it to a place where you couldn’t imagine this coming from the first song.

I love the idea of exploring the genre tropes that you were talking about, in multiple genres, to see what each genre’s tropes brought out in terms of the meaning of the piece.

That’s exactly the concept. The idea I have for it is called Kaleidoscope, which would be the name of the song—which I haven’t written. [laughter] This is just literally an idea, but it would be the name of the song and you would hear these lyrics and then every song is a turn of the kaleidoscope—and of course, the kaleidoscope conceals as much as it refracts. So by the end you might have a completely different picture of these lyrics than you first had.

Another thing: I’m constantly trying to come up with stuff where I wonder, “Could I prompt AI to do this?” I might be able to prompt AI to do that idea, but not in the way that I want would want to do it.

It reminds me of one of the things that fascinates me about music, how you can have one experience hearing an album for the first time and then a radically different experience another time, and yet it’s still the same piece of music with the same lyrics.

Yeah. Records like Become Other are designed to reveal more upon repeated listens. With luck, the more you talk about them and the more you find out about them, the more interesting they become. It’s always a challenge to get people through it the first time, but hopefully it’s a rewarding experience after a couple listens when you start to hear, “Oh, that’s the melody from the last song.” And you see the web of connections—the weaving of the tapestry, as the metaphor is in Become Other. I love that. I love being able to come back to a record and discover something new and say “Whoa. Wild! I can’t believe that’s happening.”

And the third idea?

The third idea is something I’ve been slowly working on over the course of a few years, which is sort of like a musical Our Town where it’s a collection of standalone songs, all from the perspective of a single narrator. It’s basically character sketches, almost, but from the perspective of a narrator. I always say that, in fiction, the true main character of any first-person novel is the narrator. That’s sort of the goal behind this piece, to paint a picture of a town and its characters and the narrator in one fell swoop.

It’s much harder than I thought it was going to be. I’ve written a bunch of character sketches that don’t quite do the job, but I’m chipping away at it. It’s a project.

Very cool. I wonder if that could become the one you described as option one, a performance piece with just guitar and harmonica?

Definitely.

No, don’t listen to me, I don’t know what I’m talking about. You’re the composer! [laughter]

Yeah, neither do I. That’s part of the fun of being the composer, you’re just making it up!

[Photo credits: Top and bottom images by Math Beth Dinges; middle image by Chris Ruggiero]
[Many thanks to Ben Bostick for the conversation and the photos! Visit him at www.benbostick.com]