biographical info
Ben Somer is a gifted songwriter, a silver-tongued devil who shares his
tales of love and faith with soulful charm and witty despair. Although
his songs have various angles and attitudes, storytelling is always
their essence and their aim – particularly on The Last One,
Ben’s new sophomore release. As cohesive as the legendary LPs of the
seventies, the shape of this album was as important to him as the
sound. It is appropriate then that The Last One has the feel of live playing: intricate but not over-produced, it is a refreshingly human sounding album.
The Last One is a real departure from the 23 year old’s previous
recordings, which were self-produced in his own basement studio. This
one came together in Toronto’s Rogue studio with Les Cooper (the
award-winning producer of Jill Barber and Meaghan Smith), where a
who’s-who cast of Canadian musicians invigorated the sessions, bringing
new life to Somer’s folk ballads. The new album is distinguished by its
pithier themes. There are songs of carnal conflict, but these love
songs have been stripped of their sugarcoating and infused with a
hearty dose truthfulness. Candor and sincerity are as important to his
sound as compressions and rarefactions. His songs are soaked with
whiskey, women and war, and often allude to ambiguous signs of the
divine. “Caught in the Fire” asks spiritual questions without presuming
to give any answers: “there’s been faith and there’s been truth, but
they were both not truly right”. One of those conflicting truths is
“home”, another recurring theme. It was the title of Ben’s first album
and it appears in The Last One
as a source of beauty as well as heartbreak. It is also the source of
his character. Ben might have been born in Dundas, Ontario, but he was
raised at the hockey rink, in the woods of the Haliburton highlands and
on the pages of John Irving. He’s been influenced as much by the cry of
a lone loon as the cough of a drunken poet.
Intense and yet self-deprecating, Ben’s eyes gleam when he talks about
the creative process. His voice is as important to the process as the
words and the melodies. He sings “Last Cigarette” like a hollow-eyed
troubadour, in a smoky haze which matches the title. The unstoppable
intensity of “Stiff Drinks and Hand Grenades” is juxtaposed by the rasp
in “Lies in July” which plays a poignant duet with the jangle of the
banjo, giving us grace as well as gloom in each organic phrase. The
haunting echo in “Codeine” is quite a revelation and entirely
appropriate for a song which finds the last bit of humour in lost
causes. The album ends in spectacular fashion, with “Tumbling pt. 3”,
where his raw throaty delivery, playing off the soft, undiluted
electricity of his Gretsch, shows a man who has been burnt by the
flames of passion, rejection and ironic enchantment.
In “Lies in July”, Ben writes: “I made mistakes and I made more, but I
got smarter every tour”. Well, he also got bolder and better every
album. The Last One
demonstrates how far he has stepped out of his comfort zone, both
vocally and thematically. His writing blends a heart-wrenching
earnestness with his tongue-in-cheek wit, evoking comparisons to Tom
Waits and Leonard Cohen. With the release of The Last One, Ben hopes to step out of the shadows and claim his place as one of this country’s premier songwriters.