Ben Garnett: Crafting Acoustic Beauty on Kite’s Keep
This link takes you to the podcast and video episode of this interview; the complete show notes are also linked here with lots of important links! The transcript is below.
Ben Garnett:
If you run into a problem as a practicing musician, instead of just banging your head against the wall and hoping that something works, finding creative ways to sort of get around the wall, that's something that, particularly that I feel like Julian and Chris Eldridge are just so masterful at. They have all these really just creative ways of thinking about things and just approaching music and guitar playing that, yeah, it just leads to a much more fulfilled and sustainable and joyful life as a musician. And I'm just grateful to be around that.
Leah Roseman:
Hi, you’re listening to Conversations with Musicians, with Leah Roseman, which I hope inspires you through the personal stories of a fascinating diversity of musical guests. Guitarist Ben Garnett has released a beautiful new album, Kite’s Keep, and this episode features clips and insights from the project. The record includes collaborations with acoustic music greats familiar to listeners of this podcast, including Darol Anger and Brittany Haas. Ben’s mentor, Chris Eldridge of the Punch Brothers, also appears, and Ben discusses the wisdom he’s gained from other influential musicians in his life, among them his cousin, acclaimed rock guitarist Andy Timmons, the brilliant Julian Lage, and bandleader Missy Raines. He also talks about how playing tuba was helpful, and how he immersed himself in a range of musical styles—studying jazz in university before finding his way into Nashville’s acoustic bluegrass scene.Like all my episodes, you can watch this on my YouTube channel or listen to the podcast on many podcast platforms, and I’ve also linked the transcript.It’s a joy to bring these inspiring episodes to you every week, and I do all the many jobs of research, production and publicity. Have a look at the show notes of this episode, where you’ll find all the links, including different ways to support this podcast!
Hey, Ben, thanks so much for joining me here today.
Ben Garnett:
Thank you so much, Leah. It's a pleasure to be here.
Leah Roseman:
I've been loving discovering your music. I've mostly been listening to your new album, Kite's Keep, which we'll be focusing on, but also some of your previous projects. So maybe we'll get a little bit into that because some of these collaborations overlap as well.
Ben Garnett:
Totally. Yes, yes, yes, yes.
Leah Roseman:
Yeah. So the title of the album does not relate to any of the track names,
Ben Garnett:
At least not directly or just sort of the loose, I guess, poetic meaning I had in mind with Kite's Keep was that it was supposed to convey a child's inner world or a dream scape of sorts, and each song on the record is sort of this, I don't know, a peek into a little vignette of just some kind of realm of imagination that kind of takes you through that journey and just different,
I don't know. I guess part of the beauty of instrumental music, I think, is that the meaning is so non demonstrative. It's so open and so limitless as far as what it can mean to somebody. And I kind of like to lean into that, I guess. And I like to come up with titles that are, I guess, evocative enough, but don't get in the way of how something could be, could have multiple interpretations, I suppose, to the listener.
Leah Roseman:
So I'm just curious, are you meaning kite as in the bird or the toy?
Ben Garnett:
Oh, the idea was maybe that would be the name of the child, but also it is sort of a symbol of freedom or this limitless. I just remember being a kid and just the things I would remember thinking or just so in some ways, so much more expansive than the stuff I think about now. And keep just being your treasury of thoughts and just your inner world of things that you're thinking about. And so, yeah, so Kite's Keep sort of a child's inner world, kind of a kingdom of imagination, I suppose.
Leah Roseman:
That's beautiful.
Ben Garnett:
Thank you.
Leah Roseman:
When we talked about doing this interview right away, of course, I noticed that Brittany Haas and Darol Anger were on the album. They've both been on this podcast, so people even who didn't know about them before will hopefully, and I'll link those episodes, the first track, right away heard Brittany Haas' playing, Look Again, another great title, and it's a wonderful opener. So we're going to play a clip, a short clip for people, and of course the album will be linked,(Music: clip of Look Again, Kite's Keep album) but I am curious about the set list in terms of the album and your recent album tour. When you're doing it live, are you keeping the same order?
Ben Garnett:
Right, right, right. Great question. So we did an album release show actually in Nashville the day the album came out. It was October 10th. And for that show, we actually did the entire record in order top to bottom, mostly because I had the band members that recorded the record playing with me minus Darol, but it was Brittany, Ethan Jodziewicz , Chris Eldridge on some additional guitar later in the record. And then my friend Matt Glassmeyer playing some piano on one song. So for that show, we did the whole record in order. But then for the tours, I think we always start with Look Again. Cause I feel like that's just kind of a nice way to get the band warmed up and the energy's good on that one. It kind of gets everyone engaged in a nice way. But then from there we kind of go, we tackle some songs that happened later in the record. We do some cover songs, and so it is a little bit more mix matched and adding different things in for the live shows. But yeah, it's interesting what translates as far as a programming for a record versus programming for a live show. I think those things are different in a way,
Leah Roseman:
And sometimes I think performers will tweak the order in the moment according to the energy of the audience.
Ben Garnett:
Absolutely. Absolutely. Yep.
Leah Roseman:
Yeah. So the second track, Tell Me About You with Darol Anger. I mean, you've been in Nashville for a while. Had you met him early on or?
Ben Garnett:
A couple years ago, or maybe three or four years ago, or in Nashville? There's a lot of these either parties that center around jamming, playing together or just people invite all their friends, and then you meet people that way. So I probably met 'em at one of those gatherings at some point. I'd always kind of just dreamed about playing with him, 'cause he's been a hero of mine for so long. Yeah, this tune, or I had a couple tunes actually, and I just thought he'd be just the perfect fit for that. And so reached out to him and he agreed to play on the album, which I'm very grateful for. And yeah. Tell me about you specifically. I brought in a lot of the core just arrangement and ideas and melodies and things, but he really had a hand in, I suppose, the interpretive quality of that piece and really bringing his voice and just adding life to it, which he so famously and over the many, many years he's been making music. That's just kind of what he does the best, in my opinion.
Leah Roseman:
What's he like to work with?
Ben Garnett:
Oh, just the best. I mean, it's so great and he's very, yeah, he's so good at, he's working with the material that you've brought to the table, but he's kind of has this way of suggesting, it was almost like it was a mentoring session in a lot of ways of him sort of guiding the composition in a way. And he also was able to make things, at least the parts I was wanting him to play, I feel like he kind of helped me figure out how to break them in a certain way. So the music kind of had more of this casual, maybe more interpretive quality to it where it wasn't so rigid. It wasn't like, you have to play this exact thing here and then do this here. And he was able to bring in this, I don't know this, he's able to just open it up in this really beautiful way, and it is hard to talk about, but he does it and it's just so, so great.(clip of Look Again)
Leah Roseman:
The beautiful album cover, Emilio Mesa, did he take the photo?
Ben Garnett:
Yeah, yeah. That was a photo from a long time ago actually. We did a photo shoot actually for my first record back in 2020, I think it was right before COVID started happening. And just kind of a fun, Emilio was an old friend of mine, so I went to school in Denton, Texas at the University of North Texas. And Emilio was actually a peer or a fellow jazz student there, and we just stayed in touch over the years, and he got really into photography, experimental photography, and I knew I wanted a more just experimental cool photo shoot for my first record. And so we did that, and I think that photo was, it was shot on expired Kodak film, so it has this, I'm not sure exactly what that does to the film actually, but it creates this only painterly washed feel to it, and it's just great. So in looking for an album cover for this album, I just was looking through some old photo shoes and I was like, wow, that one's really, it's pretty strong as far as a shape and
Leah Roseman:
This dreamscape feel
Ben Garnett:
In the dreamscape feel. Exactly, exactly. Yeah.
Leah Roseman:
So you played Tuba in school?
Ben Garnett:
I did, yeah.
Leah Roseman:
So your first instrument?
Ben Garnett:
Well, no, piano was my first instrument, actually. I started playing. I mean, it was very casual, not very serious. But then, yeah, tuba came to the picture when I was 12, I think at least in Texas, sixth grade was the time when all the grade school kids could join the concert band and started playing tuba in the concert band and stuck with it for all the way to my senior year of high school, and was almost thinking about doing it for college. But then I was really into the tuba, and then I was taking also kind of serious classical piano lessons. And then also guitar was a very strong part of my life, but ultimately the guitar won over.
Leah Roseman:
So before we get into your life as a guitarist, I'm just curious, do you think playing at the bottom of the band, playing the bass line gave you something?
Ben Garnett:
Yeah. What a great question. I absolutely think so in playing at the bottom of the band, but also just playing a part of a really large ensemble, I think gave me, yeah, it's interesting to think about. I mean, I definitely think it gave me a certain orchestral sensibility and just understanding how parts work together, especially as a guitar player, because I think guitar is such a community that centers around the guitar itself, and obviously the guitar is playing in a smaller ensemble just historically or whatever. Thinking of myself as part of a larger wind ensemble or a symphony orchestra or something playing the tuba, I think it gave me a realization of just how powerful that could be of how parts can work together and the beauty of that. So I definitely think it probably informs the way I write music and arrange music nowadays, especially now being in the string band world primarily. It's like a lot of string band music kind of has that orchestral quality to it.
Leah Roseman:
So your cousin Andy Timmons.
Ben Garnett:
Yeah.
Leah Roseman:
You want to tell us about him?
Ben Garnett:
Yeah, totally. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Andy, he is, in my opinion, one of the best living rock guitar players of all time, just incredible. And he's my cousin. So when I started playing guitar, actually right around the same time I started playing tuba when I was 12 years old or so, my dad told me that I had this cousin who's a fairly well known rock guitar player, and his record Resolution had just come out, and it's a trio record largely. It's just like electric guitar, bass and drums. As soon as I heard that album that kind of changed my life, it was like, whatever that is, I want to be able to do that on some level. So Andy's coming from this instrumental rock guitar like Joe Satriani, Steve Vai, Eric Johnson, kind of this crew of eighties, nineties guitar players that were really big and just this instrumental rock guitar scene.
But Andy's thing was always, it was very song oriented, and those other guys actually very song oriented music, and I love that music too. But I think what Andy's music kind of instilled in me, at least probably subliminally at that age, was just how powerful, or just how much power you can get from just delivering a song, even if it's in an instrumental guitar format, just how powerful that can be. And it's not necessarily about shredding or playing really fast or doing crazy guitar pyrotechnics. It's really about just can you just say something? And yeah, that was just a really important album for me to hear. I think at that time, a really formative record. And then furthermore too, that record is a rare, as far as orchestration, a rare thing in this catalog where there's no overdubs on that album. It was just one guitar track, one bass track, and one drum track, because usually these rock guitar albums have a lot of keyboards or synths or, I don't know, it's a lot of different things happening, but there was a certain austerity to that record. It very, there's a lot of space for it being as high energy as it needs to be for being a rock record. And yeah, I think that also had an influence as well, especially now that I'm playing in a more trio oriented format with fiddle, guitar and bass.
Leah Roseman:
Yeah, no, I was just thinking, I have interviewed Pat Irwin a couple times who composes for cartoons and also has this rock guitar career, and he toured the B52s for 18 years, but recently he's playing in a trio exactly that format. And in our last interview, he was saying, yeah, you're so exposed. It's like fun, but.
Ben Garnett:
Oh man, the trio. Yeah, we just did a tour two weeks ago, or my album released tour and yeah, learned so much about just, I don't know, that ensemble, it's tricky. I don't want to say that it's easy to sound bad because I don't try to buy into things that are good and things are bad. It's all just different, or it's all, it's what you're going for. It's not necessarily good or bad, but it's easy for, especially an acoustic trio like that, unless everyone is just hive mind, totally together, playing with pounds and pounds of intention. You have to play with so much intention for things just to even come across as coherent. I think there's a lot to learn about just being musical and being intentional, and yeah, there's nowhere to hide in a trio, for sure.
Leah Roseman:
So Ben, before we leave Andy Timmons, so he played with,
Ben Garnett:
Yeah, sorry, sorry.
Leah Roseman:
No, no, don't apologize. So he played with Danger Danger, Olivia Newton-John, some big names people might've heard of. So you did have a relationship with him and saw his huge collection of over a hundred guitars.
Ben Garnett:
Yeah, yeah, yeah. It was amazing. Yeah, no, I know. He just took me upstairs to his studio and yeah, hundreds of guitars, tons of vintage amps, and yeah, I guess from a young age, I was able to see just, I don't want to use the word guitar god, because I think that maybe is not, I dunno, because he's human, the rest of us. But yeah, I definitely got to witness just how the great guitar players, I dunno how they work and what their home life is like and all that stuff. So it was cool. It was really, really special.
Leah Roseman:
But at a young age, it also gave you a glimpse of the life of a touring musician.
Ben Garnett:
Absolutely. Yes. Exactly. Exactly. It validated that in a really powerful way too. It was like, oh, yeah, this is a totally, I don't come from a musical, or at least my immediate family is not a musical family. And so I think for them, it kind of gave them this window into this other way of living life, I guess. And yeah, it was cool, really cool.
Leah Roseman:
I wanted to ask you about Julian Lage, 'cause he was an early mentor.
Ben Garnett:
Totally.
Leah Roseman:
It's one of these names I kind of heard about, but then I looked him up more. Very interesting, child prodigy, and he's actually has done duo albums with Chris Eldridge,
Ben Garnett:
Yup.
Leah Roseman:
your other main mentor.
Ben Garnett:
Definitely.
Leah Roseman:
So how did you meet Julian and what was that mentorship relationship like?
Ben Garnett:
Yeah, yeah. So I met Julian at, there was this camp in Savannah, Georgia called the Acoustic Music Seminar, put on by a great mandolin player named Mike Marshall. And I don't think it's happening anymore, unfortunately, but there was a string of years, maybe like six or seven years where it was going on every single year. And Julian was a teacher at this camp, and I was able to go, I think it was 2017. And yeah, it was crazy. Actually, Mike Marshall was running it. Julian was a teacher. Brian Sutton was also teaching that year, Aiofe O'Donovan. And then I think that was the main kind of core faculty. And then Edgar Meyer came in for a masterclass that week. Sarah Jarosz, I'm forgetting some of the other musicians, but, so it's linked with the Savannah Music Festival. So often musicians that are playing at the Savannah Music Festival that know about the camp will come and also do something with the camp.
So it was amazing. And that was my first time meeting Julian. I got to work with him. Part of the format of the camp was that all the participants had to bring in two songs or two pieces, and every day there'd be two main sessions where I guess Mike Marshall and whoever would arrange the students in different groups and would select a song of the songs that all the students brought to workshop for that part of the day. And then one of the instructors would be sort of hovering or essentially producing the session. And luckily was able to do most of those sessions that I was playing in. Julian was the mentor, the producer of that session, and just really formative lessons and just things that he talked about. And for his, I dunno, kind of joyful. And he kind of has this angelic presence in a way. He kind of just amidst this really beautiful, joyful energy. Despite all that, he can be very direct intense, can really tell you what he's thinking about something. And it was great. It was stuff exactly that I needed to hear as a 22-year-old musician. And most of it revolved around just listening and how to play with your fellow musicians and not play at them.
You're just part of the bigger picture. It's not all about you. Not only is it not all about you, but how do you actually enhance the musicians playing with you, which is a huge one. And I'm still thinking about that and working on that, but that was definitely probably one of the bigger lessons. I feel like he imparted on me. It was just a week, it was just seven days of that camp. And anyway, that's where I met Julian and I also met Chris Eldridge at that camp as well, because him and Julian played a set at the Savannah Music Festival that year.
Leah Roseman:
I was just thinking what you were just saying, I'm in the classical world, and that can be so true because people spend hours locked up in practice rooms by themselves. Even if they play, have some ensemble experience, they don't sometimes really get it.
Ben Garnett:
Exactly. Yeah. It's a muscle that you can only really work unless you're playing with other people. You can spend as much time in the practice room as you want, but the real thing or the real, just magic, I think it comes from that relationship or those relationships that you have with other people in the moment.
Leah Roseman:
For me, I like to think of widening my focus.
Ben Garnett:
Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. It's like tapping your stomach and rubbing your head or something to be able to really, to have what you're doing, be such a, in some ways, you don't want to be really thinking about what you're doing because you want all of your attention to be a part of the room or a part of the other musicians that are doing things. And you want to be able to have that kind of instantaneous reactive quality to your musicianship of can you be flexible and available enough to just be present and be an adaptable person to the constantly changing environment around you.
Leah Roseman:
So Chris Eldridge.
Ben Garnett:
Yes.
Leah Roseman:
You met him in Savannah as well. He's been such an important musician in your life, and actually your first album he produced, and with this release of Kite's Keep, I saw the little interview with him, and he was saying how you've kind of come into your own, you are the session leader. I mean, you did everything for this album,
Ben Garnett:
Right? Right, right. Yeah, yeah, yeah. He produced my first record, and that was a, I guess we started meeting and doing pre-production in 2019, actually. And then we recorded towards the end of 2019, early 2020. And then COVID happened. I think the album already was kind of ambitious, at least from my end, because I didn't necessarily have a set repertoire that I was trying to record on Kite's Keep, where I had a vision for that repertoire, my first record Imitation Fields, it was much more like what's, I kind of just showed him everything I had written until that point that I thought was coherent enough to show him, and he was able to kind of select the ones that he felt like, I don't know, it sounded the most like me, I guess, or that he felt like were most representative of my compositional voice, I guess. So it was in a lot of ways, just a lot more open of a project. And then there was also this whole element of electronic manipulation and electronic post-production that we were working with within a string band context. And just because that hadn't, I mean, there are some examples of that over the years, but the particular aesthetic that we were both looking for hadn't necessarily been created yet. So it was just a lot of experimenting. And then I think also COVID played into it, just we had all this time now.
Leah Roseman:
I was wondering about that.
Ben Garnett:
Yeah. Yeah. So the process of after we recorded just took way longer than usual, I would say. It was almost just my first record. It was just learning about how to edit and how to really say the things that I wanted to say with the music. And it was at times frustrating, but most of the time just a beautiful mentorship and learning experience to work with him on that.
Leah Roseman:
So he's featured on the two last tracks of Kite's Keep. I have to ask about the title Post Office Prodigies.
Ben Garnett:
Yeah, I don't know where I found that, actually. So that piece, actually, I will be honest, I wrote it sort of as a joke at first. I just wanted to see if I could write something just in a more pop music temperament, I guess. So I actually, I probably wrote 20 or so melodies. I kind of had that form. It was like E Major ABA in the way that Bill Frisell kind of writes tunes like that at times. He'll take a, he will write something that is very common or just plain template, and then he uses that as a vehicle to improvise, and it's very compelling. I think it's a very cool aesthetic. And so I was sort of thinking about that and wanting to work with that. But yeah, this melody on Post Office Prodigies, that was just one of the 20 little pieces that I had written. I was like, I actually really like this. (Music: clip of Post Office Prodigies) And then the title came afterwards and I don't know, POP, that's like pop. That was at least part of the inspiration, I suppose. But then, yeah, Post Office Prodigies sounds like a bad nineties band or made up some kind of band or something. But then also it kind has a beautiful poetic thing, I suppose, of just extraordinary people in ordinary places. I guess just the fact that anyone can be a prodigy in their own way.
Leah Roseman:
Actually, speaking of prodigies, when we were talking about Julian Lage, I meant to ask you, so I'd read he developed Focal Dystonia and then got over it.
Ben Garnett:
Yeah, right.
Leah Roseman:
When you knew him, was he suffering with that or
Ben Garnett:
No, I don't think as much as he was before. I actually don't know when that was, when the main time of that was for him. I feel like it was during his college or closer to his college, because he went to Berklee College of Music, I believe. I think it might've been more around then, but I know he's not only just a master of music and improvisation and guitar and whatever, but a master of movement. And he studies this modality of movement education called the Alexander Technique, and he's just so deep on how we can really work with our bodies, the natural design of our bodies to get the most efficient response or the most efficient response and performance out of ourselves and our instruments. And we got into a little bit of that at Savannah, but the Savannah thing was mostly music oriented, I would say, but I know he's thought a lot about that, and it's something that I think because he had his injury, I revolutionized his whole technique around this kind of thinking about movement and being efficient and really thinking about how our bodies actually want to move rather than how we think they want to move.
Leah Roseman:
Yeah. No, I've had quite a few people on the podcast talk about this stuff, and actually when your episode's released, I will have already put out my episode with Jennifer Johnson and Body Mapping, which
Ben Garnett:
Oh, cool. Yeah,
Leah Roseman:
It sort of came out of Alexander Technique, but I've done both, and I think it's better. It's really, really great.
Ben Garnett:
Cool. Yeah, it is something I don't know a ton about, but yeah, I know body mapping.
Leah Roseman:
So we were talking a little bit about Chris Eldridge, so I'd love to know what you've learned from him in terms of composing and is a guitarist, and some people may not know who he is. Maybe you could just speak to that a little bit.
Ben Garnett:
Sure. Yeah. Chris Eldridge, otherwise known as Critter or Critter is his nickname. And yeah, Critter, he's just one of the greatest musicians and guitar players alive. He grew up sort of around bluegrass royalty in a way. His dad, Ben Eldridge, was the banjo player in this really influential bluegrass band called The Seldom Scene. And his mom actually too, Diana is a really amazing banjo player. So he's the son of two banjo players. Yeah, I think he also, similar to me actually started with electric guitar and was really this one guitar player named Eric Johnson, who's actually very close friends with Andy. They're both these Texas instrumental rock guitar powerhouse players.
So Eric Johnson was like Critter's first main guitar hero. It's cool because I feel like he and I share that initial influence on the guitar. And then I think Bluegrass, his mom gave him a copy of Tony Rice's acoustics album, and I think that kind of changed his world, and I think he just got deeper and deeper into acoustic guitar and bluegrass and wound up going to Oberlin College of Music. And then he joined a band called The Infamous String Dusters, that was his first group, and then eventually joined the band Punch Brothers with Chris Thiele.
Basically, since joining Punch Brothers, he's just been on the front lines of acoustic music and just what's possible, and really pushing the boundaries in all these beautiful ways, while also being very rooted in bluegrass and traditional music and just being this how I don't know, he's able to transmit, he's such a walking encyclopedia of traditional music. It's awesome. The way I came to know about him was actually through Julian, because I discovered there was a record that they put out, I think it was 2012, an album called Avalon, and I think that was their first full length album as a guitar duo, Chris Elridge and Julian Lage, and that album totally in a similar way that the album I talked about before Resolution kind of changed my life. Avalon totally changed my life.
Leah Roseman:
Hi, just a really quick break from the episode. I wanted to let you know about some other episodes I’ve linked directly to this one, which I think may interest you, with Darol Anger, Brittany Haas, Marc van Vugt, Tal Yahalom and Alisa Rose. In the show notes you’ll also find a link to sign up for my newsletter, where you’ll get exclusive information about upcoming guests, a link for my Ko-fi page to support this project directly, where you can buy me one coffee, or every month, and my podcast merchandise store with a design commissioned from artist Steffi Kelly. You can also review this podcast, share it with your friends, and follow on your podcast app, YouTube, and social media. All this helps spread the word! Thanks. Now back to my conversation with Ben
Ben Garnett:
Because at that time I was going to the University of North Texas. I was studying jazz guitar. I was pretty deep into just improvising and modern jazz and just learning all this vocabulary stuff for the music and the way that Avalon, Julian kind of brought that into the music on Avalon with Critter's, traditional bluegrass background, but then also Julian's pretty just knowledgeable and heavy traditional jazz background. There's a lot of early jazz influence in Julian's playing. It was just this incredible amalgamation of just things I just never thought were possible to put together. And they did it, and it was just like, what is this? This is so cool. With it being in such a, I don't know, it's just two guitars. The fact that they can communicate so much and do so many things just within that really kind of basic format was just incredible to me and still is. So, yeah. And then moved to Nashville, sorry. I met Critter at the Savannah Music or the Acoustic Music Seminar. And then when I moved to Nashville, became closer friends with him, and now he's one of my closest friends, I would say kind of like an older brother at this point.
Leah Roseman:
You have two bass players on this Kite's Keep,who were previously featured on this podcast because of different projects. So it's kind of cool for me. I haven't met any of you in person, but I feel like I'm knowing everyone's friends. So Paul Kowert's in Hawktail with Brittany and Ethan. I know he played with Leif Karlstrom and maybe some other people. I recognize these names and both great bass players,
Ben Garnett:
Right? Right. Oh man, two of the best, in my opinion. So Ethan is actually, he plays bass on most of this record, he plays bass on, I think, eight of the tracks. And then Paul came in just for one day and played on two songs. But unfortunately, the first song that he played on, I just couldn't find a place for it in the sequencing. So I cut it the last minute. So Paul just plays on one song, but that was a really special song, actually. It's Track five, The Clockmaker, and that one actually features both Darol and Brittany and Paul, and that was a really fun one to record.
Leah Roseman:
Do you want to say anything more about that track?
Ben Garnett:
Yeah, that was a fun one to write, because I kind of had this, I guess, kind of likey melody. I had that for a long time, but I guess trying to figure out just different ways to present it. I was listening a lot to, there's a really great record that Edgar Meyer did with Mike Marshall and Bela Fleck called Uncommon Ritual, where there's a lot of, yeah, a, it feels like they're presenting traditional melodies, or they're pretty basic melodies, but in these very interesting ways, they're arranging them, but they're also, it's so much about the context in which they're playing the melody, if that makes any sense. Just the orchestration around the melody, that was probably percolating in the back of my mind when I was writing The Clockmaker. So yeah, I feel like that piece is interesting because it relies a lot. There's definitely a pretty heavy handed textural element to the piece, but there's also sort of this independence of parts. Just for instance, the bass kind of starts off in a 3/4 time figure, 1, 2, 3, 1 2, and the melody's in four four, and just having that independence, but it also kind of works together. It sort of reminded me of clocks ticking at different times, but they're all in the same wall. They're all connected somehow, because it's all coming from the mind of this clock maker or something.
And so the piece just kind of develops from there and takes those various motifs and things. Yeah.(Music: clip The Clockmaker)
Leah Roseman:
So Ben, talking about creative prompts and inspiration, I was reading that you really love art house film, and there's a cinema in Nashville, the Belcourt that you like to go to.
Ben Garnett:
Yeah, yeah, yeah, absolutely. Yep.
Leah Roseman:
Do you have favorite films or something you've seen recently?
Ben Garnett:
Oh boy. So many favorite films. Unfortunately, I've not been able to see a lot of films lately just because I've been so focused on this album release tour that we did a couple of weeks ago. And just putting out the record in general, I just haven't been able to go down there. But there was a while where I was going to the Belcourt maybe three times a week.
Leah Roseman:
Wow.
Ben Garnett:
A couple times a week. And it was just, I don't know. I get a lot of inspiration from long form art, especially this day and age where everything just feels so chopped up and you get 30 seconds of this, you get 30 seconds of that. I dunno. Or thinking about films as albums or something, or thinking about at least the trajectory of how a film takes you from point A to point B and how a song can do that, or how an album can do that, or that's mostly the inspiration for me at least. And then also, yeah, character development I think is really interesting. And if you apply that to just motivic material within music, I think that can be kind of an interesting parallel. And then also, I sort of think of myself in a way when I'm making records or writing music, I think of myself in a way, as a film director, I am hiring these characters, Darol, Brittany, Paul Ethan, these actors, I guess, and they're just so masterful and they're able to inhabit the perspective of the characters that I'm asking them to play. And so guess I'm watching a lot of movies thinking about what was the director thinking about when they chose this scene or how they wanted the actor to be a certain way, or why does that happen before that? Or just all these different things about goes inside a movie or any work of art, I guess.
Leah Roseman:
Yeah, just thinking back to when, I am in my late fifties, so I was a young person well before the internet, and there was just so many old cinemas, and you could just see it was such a easy thing to do. And when I was a student, I can't remember if they were discounted, but I was in Montreal at McGill, and there was just so many of these cinemas, and we were going quite a lot, honestly, more than to concerts, going to see
Ben Garnett:
Yeah, yeah!
Leah Roseman:
All these old movies and just so great. I kind of missed that feeling.
Ben Garnett:
It almost seems like movies are not know, they're just not as, they don't have as much of a hold on the public consciousness or something anymore. I mean, I think people still watch movies, but it's
Leah Roseman:
Different context, right?
Ben Garnett:
It's different context. Yeah. We're much more used to these episodic things, just shorter dealing with things in shorter doses, I think. And
Leah Roseman:
At home, alone, rather
Ben Garnett:
At home alone, instead of going to a theater and experience that with everybody. But it's fun to do that with, to be in a theater with other people and see how everyone's kind of feeling the same thing. It's like a collective dream or something. You're all going to the same place together, which is cool.
Leah Roseman:
So your jazz influence and jazz language definitely comes through in your records, but I was kind curious, so you went from rock to jazz at University of North Texas and then getting into the bluegrass, and we will get into some of your traditional bluegrass projects as well, but how did that happen?
Ben Garnett:
Yeah. Well, it was mostly through this one album, Avalon.Yeah. Because before I had heard that record, it was all electric guitar, rock, jazz. That was my main awareness and template that I was working from as a guitar player. And then as soon as I heard Avalon and just found out who Critter was, found out who Punch Brothers was, and then I discovered, I think David Grisman was next, Bela, Jerry Douglas, Edgar Meyer, Mike Marshall. Then I wound up going to this seminar, the Acoustic Music Seminar in Savannah, and then just meeting everybody and then hearing what they were listening to, and then moving to Nashville. And then I got a job with great bass player in Missy Raines about a week after I moved to Nashville. And then since touring with her, I've just gotten to meet a lot of people in the bluegrass community. And so, yeah, very stepping stone, but it just, I don't know, almost felt, I don't believe too much in destiny or fate or anything like that, but it definitely felt like I maybe walked into something that was waiting for me with that.
Leah Roseman:
So Missy Raines really a legend. Do you want to talk to her about her a little bit?
Ben Garnett:
Absolutely. Yeah. Yeah. So yeah, Missy Raines this incredible bass player songwriter, has been a part of the bluegrass community for a long time, and yeah, has been my band leader, my boss for the last eight, eight years. I joined her band in September, 2017, about a week after I moved to Nashville. The ensembles in which I've played with her have changed over the years. When I first joined her band, it was actually, it was a trio. It was like a fiddle bass guitar trio, which may or may not had an influence on the current trio that I now have. But yeah, it is more because at that time, she had this project called Missy Raines and the New Hip, which was a more electric, electric guitar kind of incorporated with that. There was drums, kind like a rock fusion, jazz bluegrass crossover group. I think she just, over the years, just wanted to go back to a more traditional bluegrass, go in a more traditional direction, and just more akin to her roots as a musician.
And I just feel really grateful that she still wanted me around for that, because honestly, at that point, I hadn't had really any experience playing guitar in a traditional five piece bluegrass band. It's so fun. In a way, it's a very, I don't want to say it's a narrow role, because within that role of bluegrass guitar, it's so expansive, but in some ways, I'm just playing rhythm guitar 90% of the time. But just studying Tony Rice and Clarence White and Doc Watson and all the great acoustic guitar, bluegrass flat pickers, and how they play rhythm guitar in that kind of ensemble, it's just deeply inspiring and definitely informs the way that I approach my own music. I think the guitar, acoustic guitar specifically is so powerful at that kind of thing of it's kind of building a stage, or it's creating a world that all these other instruments in the band can kind of inhabit. And so, yeah, it's a great privilege and great joy to play with Missy.
Leah Roseman:
And it's uncommon for a woman to be band leader in the bluegrass world.
Ben Garnett:
Absolutely. Yeah.
Leah Roseman:
Or really in any world.
Ben Garnett:
Yeah, no, and she's such a trailblazer. She did it at all costs because she was a part of Claire Lynch's band back in the day. And I think that it was safe to say that that was probably a model for her as far as a female band leader. But there was also Lynn Morris doing her own thing. There was a few female bluegrass band leaders at the time, and I think those were definitely big inspirations for her to go out and trailblaze and do her own thing, which she's done so beautifully. And yeah, I'm just lucky to be a part of it.
Leah Roseman:
So in terms of modeling for you what a good band leader is, now that you have your own band,
Ben Garnett:
Right? Right. Oh man, so much. She's such a pro. She has all of her bases covered, and no pun intended, I guess, what to bring for a merch table, how to box up all your stuff. I mean, these are non-musical things, but in some ways part of it, yeah, part of it, but just how to travel efficiently and how to just have the easiest time on the road that you can, she's been such just so steadfastly just a pro at that. Yeah. And then musically too, I think because of just her position as a bass player, she sort of, I think in a lot of ways relies on the voices and the abilities of her people that she hires to shape the aesthetic and shape the vision of what she's doing, which I think is really cool all the while because the bass is so powerful, ultimately, she's able to really make it her own. And it sounds like Missy, like Missy's music, no matter what, just that inherent collaborative environment that she creates has been a pretty big inspiration for me, because I feel like the guitar in some ways is similar within that string band context where especially in a fiddle, bass, guitar trio, it's just really collaborative. I'm trying to harness the abilities and powers of the musicians that I've hired to really make the music. So it's joyful. It's really great.
Leah Roseman:
So what strategies do you have for touring healthfully?
Ben Garnett:
That's a great question. So far, I don't have a booking agent, so I've been booking all the tours just completely on my own, which in a lot of ways has its benefits because I can route the tour however I want to. I can make decisions. I don't want to drive more than four hours a day. So we will book all these things pretty close together and try to book accommodation close by, or try to find a home stay somewhere. So yeah, I feel like when you're not working with a booking agent, I mean, it depends on the booking agent, obviously, but generally, you just have a lot more control over how the schedule goes and where you're going each day, and just how intense the traveling is ultimately. And so, yeah, I feel like I've just learned what actually goes into a travel day and what kind of energy that takes. And then if you travel all day and then have to miraculously come up with another wave of energy to put on a two hour show, I've learned what that's like, and I've learned how to work with that. Yeah, I would definitely say just all that experience with Missy has definitely led to probably more sound decisions ultimately. But anyway,
Leah Roseman:
For the guitarists listening to this, they might be curious about your instruments, your favorite instruments, your collection.
Ben Garnett:
Sure, sure, sure. Yeah. So the main guitar that I play with both Missy Raines and then for my own trio is a Huss&Dalton, these two luthiers out of Stanton, Virginia who make great instruments. And it's a 2013 traditional or TDM, I want to say, I'm forgetting the exact model number, but it's like a traditional modeled after old Martin Vintage guitars. And I love that thing. I mean, in a way I've grown into it. I think just the longer you play guitar, guitars, this is something that Julian Lage is that your instrument can be your best teacher. And I feel like that really ties into his whole, I dunno, movement, the Alexander Technique stuff, and just thinking about movement and thinking of how you relate to your own body, but then also how you relate to your body in relation to your instrument, all that stuff.
But in a lot of ways, yeah, I feel like that guitar has really been a guiding light for me and just how to play, how to project, because guitar is often, guitar is the quietest instrument in a string band or in a bluegrass band. So the constant challenge, I suppose, is how do you get heard? How do you project your sound in a way that isn't overdrive the instrument or that I feel like in some ways if you play too hard, you actually end up kind of squashing the sound or the sound's not as big as it can be.
So finding that happy medium where you're getting as much resonance as possible, but also funneling the sound the most direct way that you can. I feel like I've learned a lot about that with this guitar. And then another guitar that I have been traveling with for my own trio, I have it tuned down a whole step. And so it's just for one song on Kite's Keep, and that's a 00018 Martin guitar, again, new. I think it's like a 2010 or something like that. But yeah, sounds good. It is not my personal favorite guitar, but I like it well enough. And the pickup system sounds really great. It has a Fishman aura, it's like a mic modeling pickup system, so it kind of models the sound off microphones and you kind of get a nice pickup sound or a nicer pickup sound than most passive LR bags pickup or something like that.
So yeah, those are my two main guitars that I've been traveling with. But I guess I should also say for the record, for Kite's Keep, I was able to borrow a couple really amazing instruments from Chris Eldridge, and the main guitar that we recorded with on Kite's Keep was a 1937 D 18. Actually the same guitar that he plays on that record Avalon with Julian, actually. And actually both records plays that he made with Julian, both Avalon, and there's another record that made called Mount Royal, so that's a very special instrument to me. And getting to play it on Kite's Keep was a real treat.
Leah Roseman:
Yeah, yeah. I listened to a bit of Mount Royal.
Ben Garnett:
Oh, cool.
Leah Roseman:
Track seven, A Place for the In Between. You wrote it with Celia Hill, and you have a Guitar Duo album with her, and it features your friend piano. Well, it doesn't feature, but Matt Glassmeyer is playing on it. It's the one track.
Ben Garnett:
Yeah, yeah!
Leah Roseman:
And you have a duo record with him.
Ben Garnett:
Yes. So many duo records! Celia and I went to college together, and she mostly wrote that song because we had a collaborative duo guitar project together, so she mostly wrote that song, and I kind of tweaked it, slightly, rearranged it for this new album, and that was really fun to do that because we were going to make another guitar record that kind of never happened, and that was going to be a song on it. So I decided, and I really liked it, so I kind of repurposed it for this record, and she was thrilled, totally happy that that happened.(Music: clip of A Place for the In Between)
And then Matt Glassmeyer who, and it's so funny because him playing piano on this song is like whatever, 10% of who he is as a musician. He's just this totally amazing multi-instrumentalist, does a lot of improvised music, but has his own solo project where he writes songs and things like that. But he's also, I feel like he's just this leader. There's this linchpin of Nashville creative people. He hosts a monthly concert series at his house, and everybody comes and a couple people play, and then we just talk about all kinds of things. Sometimes he gets people from professors from Vanderbilt to give a lecture about some interesting topic or I don't know. He's able to just bring a lot of really interesting cool people together all in one place. And Matt's and I's Duo project. He primarily plays piano. It's like an acoustic piano, acoustic guitar duo, and that's entirely free music, nothing written.
We just get together and play, and then we record it as sort of a fun, I don't know if it's that fun, but as sort of a fun thing, thought it'd be fun to give him a fully composed a couple pages of sheet music to have him play on my album because we had only been playing free improvised music together, and it was a blast and he killed it. I feel like he was so kind of in touch with the sentiment of that song and just, I loved it. Just everything that he brought to that, it was just really beautiful.
Leah Roseman:
Your titles are really poetic. I'm curious, do you write poetry at all?
Ben Garnett:
I used to, yeah. I haven't in a long time, but I love poetry. It's like one of my favorite mediums, I guess, to create. Yeah, but not in a while.
Leah Roseman:
I want to ask you about teaching. You do quite a bit of teaching, so is your approach different than the way you learned from people?
Ben Garnett:
Interesting. Probably not that different because in some way that's all I have to work with is to, how people taught me is probably how I'll be teaching other people. But I also come from a family of teachers. Both my parents are academics and my dad is still teaching. My mom retired a couple of years ago, and so I feel like in some ways it's probably just a part of me, but then I've also just had so many great teachers over the years. I talk about Critter and then Julian and that University of North Texas, just the whole slew of guitar professors that were there, and then other non guitar, just the people in the jazz faculty, just incredible, some of the best teachers in the world really. And then Andy Timmons when I was really young, and even still to this day, he's just been a really important mentor.
So yeah, I know. I feel like I've had a lot of just really great models for ideas in music and how to, without banging your head against, if you run into a problem as a practicing musician, instead of just banging your head against the wall and hoping that something works, finding creative ways to sort of get around the wall. That's something that, particularly that I feel like Julian and Chris Eldridge are just so masterful at. They have all these really just creative ways of thinking about things and just approaching music and guitar playing that it just leads to a much more fulfilled and sustainable and joyful life as a musician, and I'm just grateful to be around that.
Leah Roseman:
That's beautiful. I wanted to talk about the final track. First of all, Somewhere Near Hope, another beautiful title. You use field recordings, we feel like we're around a campfire, and the final, if I remember correctly, the final chord doesn't resolve harmonically. You kind of leave the album with a question.
Ben Garnett:
Yeah, yeah. (clip from the end of Somewhere Near Hope)
In some ways, I wanted to write a blues, which I know the song sounds nothing like a blues, although I feel like because it has, or the basic form of it exists in these 12 bar structures, you have a first 12 bars and then you have a second 12 bars. So in a way, I think what's so cool about just the traditional blues form is that it actually never really resolves. It kind of has this looping around itself, quality to it, and so I wanted to write a tune with that conceit, I suppose, something that never really climaxed, but that just keeps wanting you to listen to it again and again, and and then Somewhere Near Hope just fell out. Very few pieces of music I feel like effectively do that, where we just kind of has this loop, not looping quality, but just the wrapping around itself kind of thing. I feel like that was sort of the main guiding force, and then just having something kind of meditative and feel like the field recordings sort of evoked something in that. The melody too just has so much space, and I felt like that invited a lot of different ways to present the music, whether it's field recordings or just people doing different things in the spaces, the musicians in the band, kind of filling out the spaces in different ways. And yeah,
Leah Roseman:
It is a really beautiful album. You know I listen to a lot of music, and there's a couple times I literally listened to the whole thing right through, like a concert.
Ben Garnett:
Wow.
Leah Roseman:
It's really great.
Ben Garnett:
Thank you, Leah. Thank you. That's very sweet.
Leah Roseman:
I'm guessing you guys recorded more than you could fit on the album?
Ben Garnett:
There was one song that I decided to cut last minute, but no, mostly it was pretty, because I had all the songs, basically their final form arrangement wise before we got into the studio, because like I said, I had worked with Darol on the songs that he played on, and then I had also been playing the songs live quite a bit with sometimes Brittany and Ethan Jodziewicz , and then sometimes other trios. But yeah, so unlike my first record, this, I feel like it was a lot more, I guess, intentional or just there's a lot more ideas behind before coming into the studio.
Leah Roseman:
And in terms of upcoming projects, do you have anything you want to talk about?
Ben Garnett:
Yeah, third record is definitely underway. I am kind in the middle of writing a lot of that music still at the moment, but hopefully something will emerge next year with that. I have my second leg of my album release tour coming up that now start in November, and that's entirely in the northeast. That'll be really fun. That's going to be with Brittany Haas and Dan Klingsburg on bass, and Dan and I have never really played together before, but I've heard him on a lot of records, and we have tons of mutual friends, and he just seems like a really awesome, sweet, lovely guy and a great musician. So I'm excited.
Leah Roseman:
Well, so great to meet you. So thanks a lot.
Ben Garnett:
Thanks, Leah. Such a pleasure.
Leah Roseman:
Hi, hope you enjoyed this episode. Please share this with your friends and check out episodes you may have missed at LeahRoseman.com. If you could buy me a coffee to support this series, that would be wonderful. I'm an independent podcaster, and I really do need the help of my listeners. Keep in mind, I've also linked directly several episodes you'll find interesting in the show notes of this one. All the links are in the tones. The podcast theme music was written by Nick Kold. Have a wonderful week.
