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CHEEZEBALL.NET: Thanks for making the time to talk with us.  After listening to the sonically complex production on your new album and then hearing how well these tunes held up during your pared-down acoustic show in Iowa City, we’re really curious about what prompted you to move in a new direction with this album.  We dig it, but it’s a pretty far cry from the DIY, banging-on-pots-in-the-basement sound of Stories Under Nails or Living in the Ground. 

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BEN WEAVER: Salmon return to the same river where they were born to spawn and die.  I have never wanted to spend much time going back to places I have already been, but in many ways I write the same song over and over.  I think this is because all that happens in life, if you break it down, is the same story, though it is always happening in different places, with different people and under different circumstances.  Essentially everyone is just trying to live and be happy and do something satisfying before they die and don't remember any of it anyway.  If this makes any sense this is the answer to your question.  I just keep following that thread forward, recognizing that it’s all related but always changing.   I let the music and the words take me wherever they want to take me.  

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CHEEZEBALL.NET: Would you say, then, that the fractured fairy tales in so many of your new songs ("White Snow," "Red Red Fox," "Anything With Words," etc.) are a function of your interest in re-telling a familiar story in new ways? Or is this perhaps something that happens naturally when you spend quality time in the land of the Brothers Grimm? 

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BEN WEAVER:  I really don’t know anything.  I don’t think about it.  The door is open and I let whatever is coming in, come in.  If I think too much about "why" or "how," whatever is on the other side of that door begins to go away.  I simply listen and observe.  I certainly didn’t intend to come across like I understand anything at all of my own creative process.  I think if I did I would no longer be creative.  I don’t intentionally try and spend time anywhere or in any frame of mind. The only thing I ever intentionally attempt is to be a good listener and to eat good food.

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CHEEZEBALL.NET: All right, we can take a hint.  Enough with the navel-gazing questions.  Tell us about some of the best places to eat that you’ve stumbled across in the course of your travels.  Any hidden gems that you’d highly recommend?

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BEN WEAVER:  I think one of my favorite places to eat in the world is called Prune.  It’s in NYC.  [Editor’s note: The New York Times agrees wholeheartedly.]

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CHEEZEBALL.NET: As you’re about to embark on a European jaunt, we’d love to know about some of your experiences living and writing in Berlin for a time.  Do you have a sense of what it is about Americana music that touches a chord in Western Europe?

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BEN WEAVER: I wound up in Berlin kind of by accident.  I was over in Germany doing press for the last record and I wound up with some time off at the end of the trip and my friend offered me a vacant apartment for 2 weeks.  I went there and within the first day started writing.  I didn’t really have the idea to go to Berlin and write a record, but once I was there it all came out of me.  I keep saying the record isn’t so much about Berlin as it is what the two weeks in Berlin with nothing to do besides write allowed me to create.  I would get up every morning and walk to this cafe and get coffee and then go back to the apartment and sit in the window with a guitar and the songs pretty much just came.  It was interesting to write all the songs in one stretch like that because it allowed me to go back and forth between all the songs and work on more than one at the same time.  I feel that in the end the songs have more threads in common and feel more related to each other than the songs on any of my previous records. I also took lots of walks at night, and bought beer from vending machines, and sat on bridges with people I didn’t know and watched the sun come up. Very bohemian of me...

I have no idea what it is about Americana music that they identify with.  I have always been amazed by it myself.  But I am grateful that someone wants to come to my shows and buy my records, even if I have to go across the ocean to find them.

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CHEEZEBALL.NET: Well, we wish you the best of luck as you embark on this latest transatlantic journey, and thanks again for making the time to talk with us.  Before you board that plane, though, we’d like to offer you, Ben Weaver, the chance to briefly don a critic’s cap, and assist us in our continuing quest to obliterate sonic cheeziness.  Bearing in mind our five cheezeball scale (5 cheezeballs = unlistenable schlock, 3 cheezeballs = a difficult slog, 1 cheezeball = the odd forgivable misstep) please rate each of the following American performers, all of whom famously found bigger followings in Europe than in their native country:  David Hasselhoff, Jerry Lewis, Slim "America’s Favorite Folk Singer" Whitman, and Vanilla Fudge.  Feel free to justify your answers. 

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BEN WEAVER: 

David Hasselhoff:  I don’t even think I can comment here.  I don’t know his songs.  All I know is his horrible chest hair from Baywatch. 5.

Jerry Lewis: Again you know more about this than I do.  I have no idea who Jerry Lewis is.

Slim "America’s Favorite Folk Singer" Whitman: Nor him either.

Vanilla Fudge: I played with them at a very crazy rock festival in Paris once and I met Carmine Appice.  I know that he was the one responsible for the red snapper and the groupie . . . not Jimmy Page . . . 3.

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FURTHER READING:

BENWEAVER.NET
BEN WEAVER'S BLOODSHOT PAGE
AN INTERVIEW ON MUZZLEOFBEES.COM
AMG REVIEW OF THE AX IN THE OAK
POPMATTERS REVIEW OF THE AX IN THE OAK

LEAVE FEEDBACK
RETURN TO MAIN

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