You Are The Star Tonight

Mulholland Drive follows the ridgeline of the Santa Monica Mountains from Hollywood westward all the way to the Pacific Coast Highway. The two-lane, meandering road was built in 1924 by a consortium of Hollywood Hills landowners hoping to turn a buck by bringing development to the Hollywood Hills. There’s David Lynch’s “Mulholland Drive,” and Lee…

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Rio Grande Vista

The Rio Grande River descends some 13,000 feet over the course of its 1885 miles journey from Southern Colorado to the Gulf of Mexico. I’ve crossed this, the third largest river in America, at Interstate 25 in Albuquerque, New Mexico, twice — on the return leg of my first cross-country road trip in 1990, and…

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I’ll Sleep When I’m Dead

I’m not sure it’s the Xanax, the exhaustion, the altitude, the soundtrack, or the odd, suspended-animation of transcontinental air travel, but something’s going on here. Suddenly, I feel immensly blessed. Sitting here in my exit row seat next to the galley soaring some 33,000 feet above the sun-bleached desert southwest, I feel like I’m in…

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Inventing Everything Else

Nine songs in eight hours. Not bad. Whether it was nerves, or a lack of sleep (probably both), I was sick to my stomach all day. I dashed out of the office around five o’clock, and hopped the NR. Stepping out of the subway at Prince & Broadway is a little like stepping into a…

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Breathe In (Live) – Video

Like I said to Tony before the everyone showed up for rehearsal, “If you’re gonna’ be ambitious in a big way, you gotta’ be prepared to fail in a big way.” I’ll be honest. It wasn’t our best rehearsal ever. Which is only slightly alarming given that we’re recording a new album tomorrow. I don’t…

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Though You Failed, At Least You Tried

I love this story. Colossally famous rock star (Tom Petty) reforms his middlingly-successful first band (Mudcrutch), rescuing at least one former band mate from the drudgery of teaching high school. “I just had this random thought,” Petty said. “‘I really liked that band, I wonder what it would be like to get them together?’” And…

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The Prince Of Tides

In my experience, most vacations yield a similar dividend. Whether one steps out of one’s experience for three days or three weeks, time off from one’s daily routine inevitably motivates an assessment of said routine. And rarely does that routine benefit by comparison. Not surprisingly, then, the first thing I noticed upon landing in Charleston,…

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Giving Up The Ghost (Live) – Video

There’s a lot of hope in the Music Building. The place is semi-legendary, at least to those of us who grew up watching Behind The Music. The 42,000-square-foot building located on Eighth Avenue between 38th and 39th — catty-corner from The Port Authority Bus Terminal — is eleven stories of rehearsal space: 70, 350 square…

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New Benjamin Wagner Album Due June 24 18

You knew it was coming, right? Authentic Records will release my seventh, full-length studio LP on Tuesday, June 24. The working title for the album is “The Invention of Everything Else.” Pre-production for the all-acoustic release has already begun. Tony Maceli, Chris Abad, Ryan Vaughn and I started arranging the tunes Thursday night at Ultrasound…

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