Posts by Benjamin

If you’ve listened to any of my albums from the last fifteen or so years, chances are you’ve heard Jamie Leonhart. Jamie makes rent as a background and session singer for acts like Steely Dan and St. Vincent, a vocal instructor, and a voiceover artist for brands like Neutrogena. Her first album, The Truth About…

One of the unexpected upsides of living in Wilmington, Delaware, is its population.  There are as many humans in the entire state, as there are in just Midtown, the Upper East and West Sides of Manhattan. There were half as many apartment units in my building on 71st Street, as there are houses in my…

A few years ago now, I was at my first bat mitzvah. It was actually last week’s guest, Ron Lieber’s, daughter, Talia. We were in Brooklyn. I was in my gray suit, feeling sort of stiff and socially awkward. We were queuing for tables, milling about as a New Orleans style marching band stomped through…

For the last two decades, I’ve turned to my friend, Ron Lieber, to help make sense of life’s “sweet and sour” (as Cameron Crowe once described it to me), those moments that are happy and sad at the same time. As a New York Times Columnist and Best Selling Author, Ron is always on the…

For more than thirty years, Brian Ives has kept the music news coming on Sirius Radio, Loudwire, CBS VH1 and MTV, where I met him more than twenty years ago. Brian currently runs digital content operations for Beasley Radio’s 40+ stations, and hosts a new podcast called, “How You Play Your Hand” about musicians and…

For a while there when we were making “Mister Rogers & Me” in the late aughts, it felt like a very visible project (at least to a certain community of stakeholders, boosters and fans); every stop, start, festival submission and rejection was chronicled on our website, and on social media. Certain voices really championed us.…

Sweet Baby Jesus, what a year. I left Facebook. And I launched Essential Industries. I turned fifty. I took “Friends & Neighbors” weekly. I began writing a book. I recorded a new album in Muscle Shoals (due in 2022); remixed, remastered and reissued my “greatest hits” (listen here!); and played a few rock shows.  I tried to slow down, listen…

It took me until my third album, “Crash Site,” in 2001, to write a collection of songs that really sounded like songs, and record an album that sounded like an album. At least one major recording label executive was nonplussed. “You don’t shake your ass like Ricky Martin or Shakira,” the label chief told me. “I wouldn’t…