Ben's BLOG

Hey, Blogheads

How are yous guys? You know, I'd been thinking about this a lot lately. How many of you visitors actually read the blog? Anyone? I hope so. Not that I mind writing long passages to myself...just wondering if that's the case.

I caught Chicago the movie the other night in LA, and I was very impressed. What a great movie, filled with visual metaphor and intellect, not to mention an excellent set of songs and performances. If you haven't seen it yet, you should do so. I think my favorite scene was the "Marionette" sequence, but there's just so much there, it's hard to make a decision. I was never a huge fan of "Moulin Rouge," but I'd easily put this in line with "Hedwig and the Angry Inch" as one of my favorite Movie Musicals.

If you're looking for a good alt. rock show, my friends in Angeles Drake will be playing over at the Viper Room in Los Angeles on Saturday. Hopefully, I'll see some of you there.

Cheers,
Ben

Hey, everybody

Many thanks to all who made it out to the Knit last week for the band show. We had a spectacular time, and I hope that you all enjoyed yourselves. Keep checking the events page for more concerts. Coming in just a few short weeks is a double bill over at the Derby, and you won't want to miss it. I'm really stoked about sharing the bill with Gamble & Strut. And, if you missed the Knit show, you should know that the Derby show might be the last Ben Schor band show for awhile.

I'm in the process of importing my music library from CD to my computer, and it's wild to see some of the records I've got that have been collecting dust. Sadly, it's been far too long since I broke out my Beatles records, and the Weird Al Yankovic collection has seen better days, which reminds me of something. Weird Al gets a bad rep. I mean, sure, he hasn't really been doing much lately (besides appearing on VH1 from time to time), but during his heyday, the man was pretty awesome. As my closest friends know, my favorite Weird AlBum is "Even Worse."

For those of you who are familiar with Al, he does three different kinds of songs. First, he does the straight song parodies...stuff like "Fat" for Michael Jackson's "Bad," "This Song's Just Six Words Long" for George Harrison's "I've Got My Mind Set On You," and so on. Second, there are the completely original songs, including tunes like "You Make Me." But, lastly, are the genre parodies. These ones are my faves.

If there are only three songs you ever hear by Weird Al, they are both on "Even Worse." There's "The Good Ol' Days," which is a James Taylor parody. There's my personal favorite genre song, "Velvet Elvis," which is a Police parody. Man, I can't tell you how much I love them. But, the best one is "Melanie." This one's an original, and it has one of my favorite final verses EVER. I wouldn't be surprised if you hear me playing it sometime soon.

Whew. Sorry about that, I just dig that album. Anyhoo, have a good one.

cheers,
Ben

This week's Album InSite is about the most personal song on my album, "Sitting In Limbo."

The story behind the song is a hard one for me to tell. Two years ago, while I was in college, I had some big issues arise in the course of a month. By the first days of January, my longtime girlfriend and I had split up, and I was feeling very heartbroken. This was the most intense and important relationship I’d had. But, nothing really could prepare me for what came next.

I remember the day so vividly. It was a Monday in mid-January, I had finished up classes for the day, and I headed home around 5 or so. After getting back to the house, I climbed the stairs to my room, and went over to the message machine to see if anyone had called. My parents had been vacationing in Costa Rica for a little while, and had been due back on Sunday. Usually, we talk on Sundays. I didn't hear from them, so I hoped that they had finally called. My mother's voice came over the speaker, and I remember saying "Finally."

"Ben," she said," Something has happened with your father. I'm at the hospital right now. I need to talk to you, sweetie. I'll try you again in a couple of hours, around 7."

My mind raced back and forth. I remembered that when I had left my parents' house from winter break to go back to school that my dad was feeling sick, and he couldn't understand what it was. All of us simply dismissed it as a cold or virus.

I had no idea what to do. I was shocked, and I had nothing to go on except that my dad was in the hospital. No one else was in the house, so I curled up under my blanket and began to cry. My body was shaking, and I couldn't stop it. All I could do was wait.

When I got the call around 7, the word Leukemia was almost a relief in comparison to all of the unknowns I had racing through my mind, all of the possibilities of what went wrong that I had thought about in the preceding hours. I was back home to see my folks as soon as I could be there.

What followed was procedure and treatment. When I went to see him for the first time, he didn't look all that sick to me, other than his flushed complexion and his state of mind. It wasn't until I saw him after the first bout of chemotherapy that I really started to see what he was going through. Throughout it all, I wanted to be by his side, staying at home and forgetting school. But, I stayed in Los Angeles, and visited whenever I could.

The truth of it was that I was never as scared of the outcome of the treatment for Leukemia as I was of the endless possibilities that ran through my head on that January day. I was truly sitting in limbo on that day. From the moment the treatment started, I had no doubt in my mind that he would recover. It was something I knew, something I felt. Even as I saw him in worse and worse shape, it never occurred to me that he would not get better. It wasn't even an option.

One of the things I noticed as I was dealing with this was that I was hesitant to write about the experience. During one of my classes, I put together a project that I called "The Future." It was a paper and CD about a collection of my songs, and how I was starting to feel like I had some sort of gift for premonition, and that I could write about my future before it occurred. I was able to trace certain circumstances in my life through this concept.

When it came time to discuss the current situation with my father, I cited a song that I wrote for someone I had met, a song called "Don't Leave Me Now." This song has an amazing story in itself, so I'll digress for a moment and talk about it.

About a year prior to my father's incident, I was a sophomore at USC, and I was enrolled in some Music History classes. I remember that on one specific day, our teacher launched into her lecture as usual, but stopped abruptly after only a few minutes. I saw her melt before my eyes as she told the class that she had just learned of a shooting in her hometown in the East. Her parents were critically wounded in an attempted robbery on their home, and she didn't know much, but she couldn't continue teaching us on that day. She needed to fly out to be with them.

We were dismissed from class for the day, and I went back to my apartment. I sat down in front of my desk with my guitar in hand, and I wrote the song, "Don't Leave Me Now." It was a plea from a mother to her parents, or what I imagined my teacher might say to her folks when she arrived. To say that it was one of the most painful songs I've written is an understatement.

I never did hear what happened with our teacher's parents, but she was back in School in another week, and life resumed. I never told her about the song.

Back to "Sitting In Limbo." So, as part of this project, I tried to cite "Don't Leave Me Now," as a premonition about my father's illness. It seemed to fit the concept of the project, but I never felt comfortable that the song expressed how I felt in the new circumstances with my father. Two months later, I wrote "Sitting In Limbo," and I have never changed a word or note from that day.

Flash forward to the fall of 2001. My father is doing immensely well, has been given a stem cell transplant, and is many months into his remission. As far as he knows, I’ve not written about his experience. He and my mother decide to come down to Los Angeles for my first solo show at Genghis Cohen. It is at this show that I share the song with him for the first time. Never has it been harder for me to share my music with him, and never since.

You see, I feel like “Sitting In Limbo” is the most selfish song I’ve ever written. I feel inconsiderate for focusing on my reaction to his Leukemia, and for not writing about his experience. But, what I have come to understand from my father’s reaction to that song is that he has been in limbo too, and he can relate to it.

So, I’ve resigned myself to coming to terms with it. Though I feel it is selfish, I guess I can see how people relate to it. In many ways, it is much like how I related to my music teacher’s pain. And so, I feel a bit better about it every time I play it.

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So sorry to keep you waiting on the new Web Exclusive track. I’ve been a bit overwhelmed in preparing for the show tomorrow at the Knitting Factory, but the new track should be posted in the first or second week of February. Take care, and I hope to see you soon.

Ben

Hey, friends

I'm getting really excited about the upcoming Los Angeles show with the band. It's been nearly two months since playing with them, and the show's going to sound great. So, be sure to set your calendars for Jan. 22nd at 8:30pm at the Knit.

For this week's Album InSite, here's a little bit about "Breakdown."

While studying at USC's Thornton School of Music from '98-'02, I spent seven semesters in Songwriting classes. It was during my freshman year that I came upon the class, and I couldn't have been happier. I was ready to start a new chapter in my songwriting, and the class format provided me with a consistent audience, and with feedback on my songs. However, it wasn't until the spring of 2000 that I even considered the chance of doing an album. The decision to make Nowhere On My Own stems in no small part from my participation in those classes, and I wrote every song on my album during those semesters of Songwriting.

As interesting as classes were, inevitably, there would be periods of lull. I tried to spend those times letting my subconscious go, and writing any phrase or concept that would come to mind. The lyrics to "Breakdown" were written in a period of twenty minutes during one of these lull periods, and the music came later that night.

I remember jotting down the concept in my notebook (just a simple four-line outline for the song), and working from that point. Since "Breakdown" was not directly about my life, it was almost easier to express the story of a mother and daughter relationship than some of the other stories on the album. However, I did draw from my own experience and emotion insofar as I've had times when I just wanted to get out of bad circumstances. Though I've never tried to run away, I've let my parents down before, and I know how it felt to be angry and full of remorse at the same time.

I was hesitant to give the main character a proper name. I think I felt that the story was something that many could understand, and perhaps if the character was nameless, then the song might be more universal. But, when you're dealing with two nameless females, the list of pronouns is short, and I opted to name the daughter Jess so I could distinguish her from her mother.

When it came to recording the song, I went for the "less is more" approach. I had made a couple of demos of the song prior to the album recording, all of which were acoustic guitars and vocals. But, the biggest difference in the arragement was in the bridge. For my demos, I recorded three part harmony vocals on the bridge. At the time, I felt like the harmonies helped to emphasize the fact that Jess was about to leave, and that she was making a huge decision. In the end, I feel that the harmonies came out of the blue, and may have been a little too over-the-top in their emphasis effect. So, for the album cut, we stayed with the stripped ensemble, adding only bass and minimal percussion to the solo vocal and acoustic guitars.

I'll always remember recording the acoustic guitars for "Breakdown." Much of Nowhere On My Own's guitar work was recorded in the privacy of my apartment last spring. However, as anyone who lives in an apartment in a bad part of town knows, it is incredibly hard to find moments of quiet, and since I had no soundproofing in the room, appropriate silences for recording acoustic guitars were few and far between. When I started recording the guitars, I was naive enough to think I could do it during the day, but car horns and noisy children proved too inconsistent for me to do so.

As time pressed on, and we got closer to recording the band, I had fewer opportunities to get the necessary amount of silence to record. One night, I decided that I'd try to get up at 3 am and record some of the quieter guitars for songs like "No Matter What Song Is On," and I had great success. The guitars for "Breakdown" were the last guitars I recorded in my apartment, and I finished them just shy of 6 am. As soon as I pressed stop on the recording deck, like clockwork, the birds in the neighborhood started chirping...talk about a close call.