BEN WATT
MUSICIANS:
Ben Watt: vocals, upright and grand piano, Wurlitzer EP200a, Rhodes Mark 1 Suitcase 88, acoustic guitar, electric guitar, metal resonator guitar, Juno 106, Alchemy, found sounds, sample editing, synth programming
with
Rex Horan: double bass, viola
Evan Jenkins: drums, kick trigger pedal, sample pad, tambourine, shaker
Alan Sparhawk: electric guitar, backing vocals on "Irene"
Ewan Pearson: vocoder on "Summer Ghosts" and "Figures In The Landscape"
Jennifer Valone: spoken voice on "Sunlight Follows The Night"
Written, Arranged and Produced by Ben Watt
Released January 31, 2020
The sound of the speed of life...
As I age, the sense of urgency regarding the speed of life is deeply palpable. With a combination of simultaneously inspiration and existential worry (which can shift to dread), and truly against some aspects of my inherent nature, I find myself increasingly filling the spaces of life's moments with all manner of activity, for fear of wasting time, and therefore not accomplishing what I wish (or sometimes just think) I feel the need to achieve before I inevitably reach the point where I am physically and/or mentally unable to any longer.
It is a tricky stage of life to exist in, this period called middle age, a stage where the cliche,as I have always heard it, has been proven. In my mind and spirit, I do not feel older or terribly much unlike how I felt about existence as I did during my '20's and definitely my early '30's, the point at which for myself, I felt the most like myself. Yet my body, however, this physical temple to the mind and spirit, has other ideas on its agenda as it persistently signals to me the whatever I am feeling is not designed to last infinitely. That every strain, ache, and audible creak and pop is nature's reminder that nothing lasts forever. And so, perhaps I am trying to sort of outrun the reaper by trying to write as much as I am able, to see as many movies, read as many books, cram in all of these experience for the sake of experience even when that is not physically possible and at times, to the point where my body rejects my wishes and forces me to slow down and stop.
Life during this time of Corona has only amplified these emotions as we are forced to slow down and stop while being safer-at-home and existential worries are indeed placed at the forefront. While released shortly before our global pandemic was fully unleashed, yet feeling as if it was perfectly timed to provide a soundtrack for this experience, I now turn your attention towards Ben Watt's "Storm Damage," his fourth solo album.
To bring you up to speed, so to speak, Ben Watt was one half of the richly sublime duo known as Everything But The Girl. Alongside his bandmate/partner. singer/songwriter/guitarist Tracey Thorn, and over the course of their 18 year history, EBTG crafted a collection of genre defying songs and albums that stretched and congealed through a variety of music spheres from folk, jazz, pop, adult contemporary soul, acoustic, hip-hop, electronica and dance club anthems. Left of center from their contemporaries and defiantly against the grain of commercial, corporate pop music acts, EBTG carved their own fully idiosyncratic path, enchanting fans like myself along the way with their indelible melodies, intoxicating soundscapes and insightful, involving lyrics.
While there was always a quiet and subtle quality to Everything But The Girl, they never created polite dinner music. By contrast to their sound, there was indeed a post-punk rock energy and determinism to their attitude and discography overall, as their songs were emotional yet never fell into twee sentimentality or easy resolutions. Their music was unquestionably turbulent, taking meticulously observed and felt situations, whether interpersonal or solitary, and emerging with succulent music designed for you to experience fully. Additionally, both Watt and Thorn presented themselves as private, insular people, never racing towards the spotlight. This made them especially treasured by fans as they were introverted people making music for introverts and through their immense gifts, they forged powerful and I would argue, permanent connections with fans.
Although Everything But The Girl decided to call it a day in 2000, both members have remained fiercely creative individuals, as they have each branched outwards into solo material as well as each becoming celebrated authors. For Ben Watt, this time after EBTG has been especially fruitful for me as a listener. While he did indeed co-write the EBTG songs, and serve as the primary instrumentalist and often as Producer, Tracey Thorn did receive more of the immediate attention, especially considering that she was indeed the frontwoman, the primary lead singer, the one we were designed to focus our attention upon.
Ben Watt, however, provided a sense of mystery for the band as his visage was indeed impenetrable and at times, intimidating as one was simply unable to read his gaze, despite the tenderness of his rare lead vocals. With his solo career, it is as if, even after all of these years, that we are finally having the opportunity, or better yet, we are being invited and therefore, allowed a certain access.
Where Watt's wintry solo debut, "North Marine Drive" (released February 1983), in part signaled what was to arrive in Everything But The Girl due to its insular, quiet melancholia, his work after EBTG's conclusion showcased an artist slowly emerging from the background or even a self-created cocoon. Both the excellent "Hendra" (released April 14, 2014) and the downright masterful "Fever Dream" (released April 8, 2016) extended further than anything he had achieved within his former band. Where each EBTG album essentially crafted its own signature sound, Watt's recent solo material found him slyly yet boldly converging musical styles and genres together in a fashion that was striking considering the source. Even Watt's singing had shown growth and strength in its power while his sense of melody and lyricism only grew sharper.
With "Storm Damage," Ben Watt has extended himself even further into the spotlight, so to speak, as this time, he presents a level of songcraft, instrumentation and an overall presentation that possess a striking urgency and force. There is no tentativeness, no sense of possibly holding back or muting his more emotive tendencies. This is an album of artful immediacy, a work that delivers Ben Watt at his most impassioned. Nothing hyperbolic or histrionic, mind you. Simply the work of a man in late middle age now wishing to not waste time or indulge in meaningless superficiality. "Storm Damage" is an album made within the speed of life growing ever faster by an artist who truly has nothing to lose in being more open, honest and direct than ever before. In doing so, Watt has realized a work that upon my first listen, easily announced itself as being not only one of the finest albums of 2020 but quite possibly, is the finest work he has released to date.
The albums begins with "Balanced On A Wire," a hybrid of a piano trio and electronic leanings. Without even a moment of musical preamble, the track opens immediately with the sound of Ben Watt's voice and instrumentation lost in memory, reminiscing about the anxiety of being "Nineteen years old/Life in front of you/Everything on hold/Feels like you're balanced on a wire."
Continuing further, Watt unleashed this next set of lyrics that just gripped me with the immediacy as if he were in the same room just speaking to me...
"You've been hurt before, but who hasn't?
You feel insecure, but who doesn't?
It's all or nothing now
How do you decide?"
While the song certainly addresses a certain nervous inertia that occurs when one is taking those first steps from youth to adulthood, the song also serves for anyone really at any life stage when the pains of the past and the anxiety of an unknown future collide in specific, and potentially intense moments as necessary decisions remain so difficult to enact. While Watt warmly exclaims to us that we should "Open up and to yourself be true," he wisely has placed this sentiment and song at the start of the album rather than the end, making this the ambition, the height to reach for, the very plain to which we have not yet ascended. Easy to say, exceedingly harder to do.
With the musically moody landscape suggesting hip-hop operating at its most pensive, the appropriately haunting "Summer Ghosts" finds Watt still lost in memory. Yet, unlike the previous track, this selection is one of juxtaposition, where the languid rhythms houses a cascading set of lyrics, all suggesting memories flowing too quickly to ever be held onto for more than a moment. Watt again delivers a surprisingly aggressive, conversational delivery, yet this time it is one that feels to be hip-hop influenced as he blends singing and speaking into a confessional torrent of nostalgia and middle age angst.
"My folks were just people with their own shit
And God knows there was enough of it
Wrapped up in themselves
Jazz on the shelves
It's how you deal with it
How not to make a meal of it
I watch the dark come, then let it go
I can be the Zen master, I know
Though it's easier when you're shot of it
As opposed to when there's really quite a lot of it"
Where troublesome musings on grief, mourning and mortality arrive among the daffodils by the churchyard wall in the haunting "Retreat To Find," hopeful incantations and answers are found on "Figures In The Landscape," a track that sounds positively anthemic. Fueled by Watt's double tracked or reverb drenched vocals, which strongly suggest nothing less than John Lennon's solo material, he implores us, as well as himself, with an inspirational mantra:
"One more day to live through
Take a stand
One more day to live for
Clap your hands"
Straightforward, clean, crystal clear and without lacking in poetry, the song richly propels us from introspection to engagement with the life force, again with an urgency which dictates that the speed of life will keep speeding along should we remain in an emotional stasis. The time is now, Watt is declaring. There is no more time to be tentative. It is time to engage.
But once the day is done and night falls, the means of engagement alters into something else entirely. When your home is asleep and you are left with only your thoughts, engagement happen, whether wanted or not. At this point, "Storm Damage" flows into an especially meditative trilogy of songs evoking this time of night when thoughts are especially prevalent. Beginning with "Knife In The Drawer," the song emerges on a bed of soft keyboards and a persistently rhythmic rim shot on a snare drum, which to my ears, seemed to represent a ticking clock, the passage of time when one if left to their thoughts.
"In the drawer, I found the knife that you left," Watt sings. "Now unused as a mark of respect/I picture you needing it still/Are you in need of it still?" What we have here is a song of memory yet memory that arrives within an inanimate object, where relationship and personal histories are forever stored. From these objects, this section of the album moves onward to a spaces where memories are contained within the purely ephemeral.
The mesmerizing, hypnotic "Irene" is a six minute plus standout, emerging from the haze of "Knife In The Drawer" like a phantom or even a dream. With a synthesizer pattern that percolates as if we are dancing upon one floating memory after another, Watt, augmented by superbly warm keyboards and delicately plucked guitar performed by Low's Alan Sparhawk, sings of a person, time and space that no longer exists but within his own mind. From the insistent pull of nostalgia, to the symbiotic relationships between the artist and listener, every single sound upon this track is brilliantly placed and executed making "Irene" a deeply enveloping song of recollection and remembrance. Dear listeners, I could hear this track on an endless loop easily.
After the night, a new day dawns and Watt, utilizing his Lennon-esque vocals again, next brings us "Sunlight Follows The Night," ending this mid album triptych with words of encouragement to assist him and us with facing the speed of life once more.
"Storm Damage" reaches its final three songs with "Hand," a stunning ode to regret, loss and mortality, facing one's own while grieving another's.
"I wonder who'll be there
When the light starts to fall
Who will carry my bags
When I'm weary and frail
Were we enchanted once?
I assumed I'd be loved
But I've sought punishment in love
Was I taught that when I was young?
Did I disappoint someone?...
...Were you just ashamed?
I felt numb when you died
I thought it would change
But ever since
I've felt the same"
"You've Changed, I've Changed" unfurls a beautiful voyage of what it means to love and be loved over time as we age, where expectations may or may not have transpired as hoped. Yet the existence if love itself it all that is evident and important. "Love is one long bridge," Watt sings through warm waves of harmonies, lush yet intimate keyboards and supple rhythms.
The album concludes with the majestic "Festival Song," a narrative detailing the juxtaposition of being alone yet therefore connected in a sea of fifteen thousand people at an outdoor concert. Buzzed, having the first cigarette in 10 years, being separated from the friends he arrived with and illuminated by a sea of smartphone lights and the sound of music, Watt sings to himself to forgo all of the troubles and darkness to simply allow himself to embrace the life force, and ultimately engage with the spiritual convergence at hand.
It is a wistful, heart pounding track, fronted by a longing piano and vocal and just as the song fades into the exalted sounds of a crowd, Watt returns with a superior coda, the sound of his gorgeous electric piano reverberating into the sky, plunging deeply within the spirit. Just transcendent.
Ben Watt's "Storm Damage" is a definitive statement of an album from a veteran artist who has spent the bulk of his illustrious career by not explicitly drawing attention to himself. The work contained in his songwriting, production and instrumental abilities were more than enough and have clearly endeared him to and sustained him with generations of listeners. Yet, for this album, as previously stated, there feels to be a greater urgency at work, a more overtly impassioned desire to connect, or better yet...to engage with us as listeners and perhaps, even with himself as to how he wishes to create and deliver his art.
A variety of sonic elements throughout the album, (most notably those occasional reverbed Lennon styled vocals) seem to showcase a figure no longer wanting to shy backwards but rather, lean forwards in order to amplify his message as the albums' themes quite possibly may reflect a perspective in how he may be choosing to live his life.
Ben Watt's health issues have been well documented by Watt himself within his own striking, harrowing memoir entitled Patient: The True Story Of A Rare Illness (1996), in which he detailed his experience with being hospitalized, surviving and living with Churg-Strauss syndrome, a rare auto-immune disease.
Certainly, to have continued to have engaged with life in light of this disease for close to 30 years now has challenged and transformed whatever perspective he held towards life and living before being diagnosed with the disease. But, additionally, there is the matter of the remainder of what has made up his life alongside the disease--from his family with being a husband, Father and son to the portion that makes up his artistic self expression and whatever else we do not know about. In essence everything that makes up then entirety of himself, and in turn, the entirety of what makes up you and myself as well.
This time during COVID-19 has unquestionably forced all of us to turn inwards for self-reflection in ways we may not have wished or even have prepared ourselves for an din doing so, we are being faced with questioning ourselves with how do we really wish to live, to experience, to engage. Ben Watt, through meeting himself so directly, with nerve endings exposed, has allowed us inward more than ever, while also urging us to gaze inwards to ourselves as well. The connection between artist and listener is palpable as the album indeed questions the nature of our successes and losses, real or imagined, and in doing so, how to we react to the moment in which we find ourselves.
And hey, most of all, these are 10 damn fine songs!!!!
Ben Watt's "Storm Damage" is absolutely stellar. It is the work of a vibrant artist continuing to allow himself to discover himself and in doing so, he has arrived confidently with a work that speaks powerfully to this specific stage of his, as well as our collective existence.
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