Formerly Known as ‘Waiter’.” He
says that music is what he lives for, even if at times he
has had to do it while working in restaurants.
That grim humility and clear-eyed honesty
extends to Arthur’s lyrics. Often brooding and dark-laced,
images of betrayal, sex, humiliation, faith, yearning and
death float behind a super-melodic pop facade. “Edible
Darling,” a pulsing blues number, is about a friend
who raises pigs to eat them. Like much of Arthur’s
work, it looks mortality square in the face: “The most
beautiful angel/Is the angel of death/Vinegar-throated/Confused
and bereft.” The brooding “Tonight” has
a shamed lover pleading to stay over, but it’s also
a chilling song about not being willing to go gently into
that metaphoric night. Similarly, “Keep Me Around” is
a morbidly tongue-in-cheek song, wherein Arthur one-ups McCartney’s “When
I’m Sixty-Four”, asking that his body be treasured
even after death.
If you get the idea Ben Arthur is not your
everyday folk-rock-country-blues singer-songwriter, you’re
catching on.
“There’s nothing in my work
that doesn’t smack of some pretty grim, difficult stuff,” he
says matter-of-factly. “Most of my songs are a marriage
of contradictions: bleak and difficult sentiments lurking
under an upbeat, catchy melody.”
Indeed, Arthur’s lyrical poetry and
delicate melodies remain key to his appeal, though he incorporates
808’s, DJ-scratching and drum machines on several of
the songs, with cellos and strings underlining others. There
are bits and pieces of John Lennon’s cheeky fatalism,
Beck’s homespun experiments, the earnestness of Kurt
Cobain, Jeff Tweedy’s seductive psychedelia, the exoticism
of David Bowie.
Arthur first picked up a guitar when he
was 14 and immediately began writing songs. At the beginning,
he listened to Pink Floyd, Led Zeppelin, Ozzy Osbourne, and
AC/DC, none of which you can hear in his music. He went on
to be influenced in his songwriting, so he insists, by Lyle
Lovett and Michelle Shocked, which isn’t exactly apparent,
either. In Charlottesville, where he attended the University
of Virginia, he developed a local following, and eventually
shared the stage with Tori Amos, Shawn Colvin, Bruce Hornsby
and fellow townsman Dave Matthews. In fact, Matthews’s
collaborators Boyd Tinsley and Tim Reynolds played on Arthur’s
first album, Curses and Rapture.
Familiar with Europe after traveling there
as a teenager, Arthur toured extensively in the U.K. and
Italy. Three years ago he returned to New York City after
a long tour. He arrived on Sept. 10, 2001, and the grievous
aftermath of the day after can be heard in Arthur’s “Broken-Hearted
Smile,” which portrays the city as an anguished lover. “Focal
point’s the missing focus/ The empty space through
the aisle/ Sometimes it’s all you can see/ Like the
missing tooth in a smile.”
“I prefer lush images,” he
says. “I don’t like songs that are too specific,
too literal. What interests me is ambiguity and mystery,
the spaces between the sentences. Like in ‘Strawberry
Fields’: ‘I mean, er, yes, well, no, that is,
I think I disagree….’ that’s the way people
talk. I’m most fascinated by the underlying contradictions
in people’s motivations, the way they deal with one
another.”
“Don’t hold me at arms’ length/Keep
me sun-blurred and clean,” he sings in “Sestina.” Arthur’s
music is alluring pop, but if you take a closer look, it’s
not quite as pretty a picture, “Pick up the pieces
scattered resentments/From an old explosion/Grudges and barbs/All
just mummery and gypsy fingers.”
Gypsyfingers is also the name of his second
independently released effort, which came out last year.
To complement his songwriting, Arthur says he likes to layer
vocals and instruments to create a densely textured sound.
In fact, the melodic element of his music
is so strong, the hooks so catchy, that it’s possible
to miss the underlying lyrical complexity and contradiction
in his words. All of which is fine by Arthur.
“People can hear what they want in
my music,” he says. “Like in Bruce Springsteen’s ‘Born
in the USA’, some people hear a patriotic anthem and
others hear a protest song. If that happens with my music,
I’m fine with that.”
“In fact,” he laughs, “that
sounds perfect.”
www.benarthur.com |
