Today we’d like to introduce you to Benjamin Stranger.
Benjamin, we appreciate you taking the time to share your story with us today. Where does your story begin?
My story begins and ends with music. A twenty-year career as an indie artist culminates with this Fall’s upcoming album, ‘Fare Thee Well, Follower,’ a satirical concept record confronting A.I. driven social media culture and exploring the dark, dystopian corners our technological obsessions and desires have painted us into. The singles ‘Misshapen Identity,’ ‘SUMMER ALONE’ and ‘Misshapen Id (Twanas Remix)’ have already been released and the full-length arrives in late October 2023.
Over my career, a good chunk of it spent in Downtown Los Angeles and Echo Park, I have watched (and taken part in by proxy) the music industry’s struggle to keep up with the proliferation of streaming services and the divisive menace of algorithmic social media. Now, faced with the rapid ascendancy of generative artificial intelligence, songwriters, screenwriters and other creatives have yet another monster to contend with–a monster I grapple with aurally on ‘Fare Thee Well, Follower.’ The album is a deliberate mixture of analog and digital sounds, utilizing vintage microphones and retro recording techniques alongside New Age synthesizers, vocoders, and cutting-edge engineering technology, all thanks to my team of collaborators, including chief engineer and co-producer John Meehan at Sundial Sound, co-writer and producer Trace Faulkner, mastering engineer Jason Mott and guest vocalists Bee Taylor, Crissie McCree and Melissa Mathes. This record’s narrative will stand as the completion of one story to engender the beginning of another.
I’m sure it wasn’t obstacle-free, but would you say the journey has been fairly smooth so far?
It has not been a smooth road, but what worthwhile artistic journey is smooth? Smooth can be boring, and often the most interesting stuff is down there in the ditch along the roadside–I think Neil Young said that! The main obstacle and challenge for an outsider artist who prefers substance over selfies these days is the disregard for history and the erosion of mystery. Most everything in our culture is designed for immediate consumption and immediate disposal. A lot of good stuff gets thrown to the wayside and ends up down in that ditch! I know some great records do, especially now. It’s hard to find the rough diamonds buried amid so much ‘content.’
Along with an appreciation for what came before, a sense of mystery, of exploring the unknown, is vital to most art, particularly music in its purest form with no visual element. The ubiquity of social media, burgeoning artificial intelligence and the internet in general have eroded our appreciation for artistic mystery in my view, and one of my motivating ideas for ‘Fare Thee Well, Follower’ was to satirically explore the ‘uncanny valley’ between where we’ve been and where we’re headed in sound and lyric, trading between my raw human voice and multiple manipulated versions to create a strange, ghostly tension.
Thanks for sharing that. So, maybe next you can tell us a bit more about your work?
I consider myself a songwriter first and foremost. I’ve dabbled somewhat successfully in other forms of writing but always approach each form as if it were a song. One of the things I enjoy most is that songwriting can be as reclusive or inclusive as you want it to be, and I ping-pong between writing everything myself and creating with collaborators. My near-total exploration of disparate ‘genres’ and collaborative possibilities sets me apart I think–I’m very open creatively, have worked in a wide variety of media and have learned to ‘follow the muse’ while picking up tricks on how to ‘invoke’ that muse when things get stagnant. Again, it’s all about wading into the unknown future armed with past experience.
One final thing that sets me apart, especially at this cultural moment in the arts, is my willingness to call a foul when I see one, no matter my standing. This conceptual piece ‘Fare Thee Well, Follower’ is meant on one level to call out and confront the mission creep of A.I. into songwriting. I have been surprised and frankly horrified by the rapid acceptance and encouragement of A.I.-assisted ‘creativity’ in songwriting spaces. ‘Faster and easier’ with ChatGPT or any other generative large language model is not a viable path to artistic ingenuity or integrity and threatens to erode the human creative struggle into off-line obscurity, let alone the seismic impacts on copyright law we are only beginning to chart.
The official release date for streaming ‘Fare Thee Well, Follower’ on all public platforms is now October 27 and that the SoundCloud link is a private playlist sneak-peek exclusively provided to VoyageLA readers 🙂
How do you define success?
You know it when you feel it. It is not money or recognition–it’s the same feeling you get from a job well done or an altruistic act, that feeling of receiving grace or inspiration, the feeling of completing a song.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://linktr.ee/benjaminstranger
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/benjaminstranger/
- Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@benjaminstrangermusic
- SoundCloud: https://on.soundcloud.com/z22WM
Image Credits
Jacqueline Justice photos Benjamin Stranger artwork
