'LOW KEY' CREATIVITY
Pandemic pause led to unexpected new album for Brendan Benson
Like many of his fellow artists, Brendan Benson had big plans during the spring of 2020. The Detroit native and member of the all-star Raconteurs had a new album — his sixth solo effort, “Dear Life” — ready to come out, with appearances at South By Southwest and a tour fully booked. Then the “life and lockdown that occurred” shut everything down, and again like his fellow artists Benson found himself home in Nashville, with not much else to do other than play virtual concerts via a live-streamed series he called “Boy in a Bubble.”
And he could make new music, which led to Benson's new “Low Key.” Eventually.
“After a couple years and things opening up, I wanted to tour ‘Dear Life,' and two years later it seemed kind of old so I figured I should probably have some new material out just to make for better touring,” Benson, 52, explains via Zoom from his own Readymade Studio in Nashville. For “Low Key,” which comes out Friday, Dec. 2, he “kind of went scrounging a little bit, found stuff that didn't make ‘Dear Life' and also wrote a few new things.
“In trying to just come up with product I got these (songs) together and in the end I felt differently. I felt like (‘Low Key') is something special, something pretty exciting, on its own. It's my real ‘next album.'”
Like “Dear Life,” Benson recorded the eight track set mostly on his own, playing every instrument
and producing the material before handing it off to be mixed and mastered. The songs run a stylistic gamut, from the power pop of “Whatever's On My Mind” and “People Grow Apart” to the country-western opening of “Whole Lotta Nothin'.” He had also offered the melodic, pianodriven pop track “I Missed the Plane” to the Raconteurs for the group's last album, 2019's “Help Us Stranger,” but found no takers.
There are surprises, too — notably the contemporary, hip-hop influenced sonics of the opening track “Ain't No Good and “All In.”
“I just listen to a lot of rap and hip-hop, so it was pretty easy to add that texture,” Benson says. “I think I have a knack for programming drums a little bit — not anything great, but it moves me and kind of gets me going. There's no rules, man. That music is so insane, so cool and so free. So it was fun to have some of those elements on my record.”
Another eyebrow raiser — a cover of Gerry Raf