We sit down with photographer-turned musician, Ben Bentley (Ben Went West) to discuss his debut EP, ‘Ben Went West’, creative inspirations and more!
Credit: Sydney Oliveira
How did your career as a music photographer inspire your music, if at all?
Getting to finally release this debut EP is actually is very much a full circle moment for me, all roads lead back to music. Being in a band and starting to write songs as a teenager is actually what lead me to taking my then interest in photography more seriously. Shooting live music (and eventually portraits of artists) was a way for me to remain in that world even after my band at the time had called it quits. My love of music and taking photos definitely sent me down the rabbit hole that has become my day-job as a photographer in the music industry for more than a decade and counting. Album covers and the amazing photos I would see every week in the NME were definitely some of the first photography that began to “mean” something to me growing up. The visual identity that went along with the music I loved was a big thing for me.
Where, and how do you write – what people and places inspire your sound?
The majority of my songs are personal on some level, even if they’re character or story-driven there’s always some part of me or someone I know in real-life, in there – that just seems to be how my brain works. So in that sense, nothing is off the table, everyone I meet and everywhere I travel has the potential to filter through into my songwriting. I’m a chronic note maker; potential line ideas, phrases – I’m constantly scribbling down bits and pieces of things I overhear – my notes app on my iPhone is a MESS! As someone who has travelled a lot for work, jotting things down just became part of my day to day. But as far as the actual writing of songs goes, that usually happens at home with whichever guitar is nearest, by way of a physical notebook. Writing songs is one of the few instances in life where I actually pick up a pen anymore. There’s something about writing songs in my notebook that slows me (and the world around me) down a little bit, you know? Words have always been really important to me and as such the “slowing-down” that comes with writing by hand seems to allow me a clarity that I don’t necessarily feel when I’m bashing away at my computer’s keyboard, like a mad man.
Where did you find your voice? You’ve got a cool, almost Britpop twang, with an Americana/rock backdrop…
Wow, you’ve kinda nailed me there! Haha. Growing up in the North of England in the 90s meant Britpop and the bands that paved the way to that era are just part of my DNA at this point. I remember when I first started playing guitar (and trying to sing), I was frustrated that my “sound” didn’t fit immediately into any obvious “he sounds like…” boxes. But with a little time, (especially once I started writing my own songs), I realised that was the best possible scenario to be in. One of the big turning points in my music taste came when I was about fourteen and I listened to Springsteen’s “Darkness On The Edge of Town” album for the first time and honestly, the writing, the guitars, the sheer sound of that band hit me like a freight train. Springsteen opened the door to American songwriters for me as a kid who had grown up listening to predominantly (British) Classic Rock. I fell in love with Neil Young and Tom Petty – honestly, John Fogerty’s writing for those first few Creedence Clearwater Revival albums made an indelible impression on me. In terms of more contemporary artists, in 2013, Jason Isbell’s album “Southeastern” almost instantly became one of my all-time faves. Honestly, I’m a big sponge, if it ever resonated with me, it’s all in there somewhere. It’s always funny when I play live and people come up to me afterwards and often insist on telling me who I remind them of. Sometimes they are dead, other times it’s someone I have never even heard of! haha
Tell me about your journey to this material – what made you decide to release it now, at this point in your life?
Like a lot of people, 2020 really clipped my wings work-wise and so for the first time in nearly ten years, I didn’t have a train or a plane to catch. I was still living alone in the UK doing the long-distance-thing with my then fiancé (now wife). I had literally just got home from an amazing week in Nashville when the world shut down and all of a sudden I had a ton of time on my hands and I was stuck in my apartment surrounded by guitars. Although I had never stopped playing, (just the previous year I had played some guitar on a friend’s album) – I found myself starting to write songs again for the first time in nearly a decade at that point. Thematically the new songs I was starting to write (some of which made it onto the EP) were nothing to do with what was going on in the world at that moment, rather I realised afterwards that instead that time to myself allowed me to unpack and delve into some personal topics instead.
I’ve been living here in California full-time for a few years now, but this summer is actually fifteen years since I made friends out here and started coming out to the West Coast and visiting every year after that. Although we tracked the EP in Southern California, out of the five songs on this record, there is actually only “The Ninety-Nine” that I wrote after moving here. The other four songs were written whilst I was still in the UK.
One of my best friend’s out here is Scott Sebring – a multi-talented musician and Producer in his own right. Once I started sharing the songs I was working on via our lockdown-Skype-calls, he was incredibly encouraging and kindly agreed to produce this debut EP for me, once the world started spinning again. I honestly can’t thank him enough, not only for the insane amount of work he put into this record with me, but ultimately for his friendship and putting up with me throughout the whole process.
If it wasn’t for the hard-time-out that March 2020 gave my work-life, I honestly don’t know if or when I would have finally allowed myself the luxury of the time to make this record. For all of the things that period cost so many of us on so many levels, this is the one thing I will be grateful that it gave me.
Talk me through The Last Place You Thought of As Home, and what inspired that?
“TLPYTOAH” was one of the songs that I wrote during that lockdown period. In such a bizarre time to be living through, I think that song is ultimately about my family and me trying to unpack what “Home” really means to someone who had recently moved cities, turned thirty and was living hundreds of miles away from most of my friends and family and an OCEAN away from my fiancé.
Although I hadn’t lived “at home” for many years by that point, in 2018 my parents had sold-up and moved out of my childhood home when they retired – narratively that sets the stage within the song for me to question the less physical meaning of the word – the idea that “Home” (to me), was people who cared about me and not bricks and mortar. There’s a line in the bridge that kind of labours that point; “The quintessential port in the storm – Until someone else answers the phone.”
I can’t quite articulate why, but both myself and my producer Scott Sebring immediately agreed that this song was the obvious choice for the first song on the track listing. When someone hears it they will either immediately get why it had to be the opening track or they won’t. But that said, the tension and release in Scott’s fiddle arrangement on this song totally embodies the confused sentimentality that persists throughout what I was trying to discuss lyrically.
And ‘Santa Ana Winds’?
So, the “Santa Ana Winds” is an actual weather phenomenon in Southern California. Prior to me experiencing it for myself for the first time on one of my trips out here, I had grown up reading authors like Michael Connelly and Raymond Chandler referring to the “Santa Ana Winds” in their writing as an allegory for incoming “change” in a character’s life or situation. So in the song I was writing (loosely) about the year I met my wife, when it came to writing a chorus, I decided I was going to continue the tradition of using the SAWs as the simile for the changes that being in that new relationship ushered into my life.
Will there be any live shows, with a band?
I don’t have a full-time band at this moment… One of the reasons I’m really excited to release this E.P. is because people who have seen me play any of these songs live, have only ever seen the acoustic singer-songwriter arrangements. Everyone who so kindly played on the record is scattered across California, Nashville, TN and even my hometown of York in the UK. But that said, there is a show (with band!) in the works for a little later this year that I’m really excited about and as soon as I can talk about it properly, I’ll be shouting as loudly and as obnoxiously as I can about it! Haha
Is there anything else you’d like to add before we finish?
I’ve definitely taken up a chunk of your time already, but I would be remiss if I didn’t make a point of saying that this EP and the rich, full-band arrangements have really elevated these five songs I wrote into something else completely and for that I’ll be forever grateful. Massive thanks goes out to Andy Gaines, Casey Jones, Alex Zsolt, Wayde Jones, my wife Sydniiee and of course as I mentioned earlier, Scott Sebring – all of whom loaned me their time and their talents out of the goodness of their hearts. You only get to make a debut record once and I’m honestly really proud of what we made.
Thanks for having me, Soundsphere!
Follow Ben’s music here: https://www.instagram.com/benwentwest/
The self-titled debut EP “Ben Went West” is streaming everywhere from September 13th.
