Back in 2013, Benjamin Booker arrived in Nashville to begin work on his self-titled debut at The Bomb Shelter, the first time he had been in a studio to make an album. He reminisces about the community and scene he found here at that time, watching bands like Clear Plastic Mask and going to the Fond Object record store out East.
He was living in New York around the release of his second album Witness back in 2017, and that’s the last album we would get from Booker…until now. Wherever he goes, the community he lives in inspires the artist creatively in a multitude of ways. Since Witness, he moved to Los Angeles. Although it seems like he has been quiet for a long time, Booker had been steadily working towards his new album, Lower.
“I was in LA and was trying to figure out what I wanted to do next, but I found the community out there to be very inspiring,” Booker said. “My friend gave me a TASCAM and was like, ‘If you record yourself, it’ll change your life.’ I saw people with little bedroom studios making big music. Technology has just gotten to the place where you can do anything that you want yourself at home with very little equipment. It was like, ‘I’m going to go down that road,’ but it took time. I had to learn how to do a bunch of stuff. By the time I met Kenny Segal, and we linked up around 2020, I knew a little bit more about what I was doing. We were able to record for a couple of years and figure out what we’re doing. I was mostly just living life, starting a family, and trying to make the record that I wanted to make.”
In 2019, he would make another move — this time to Australia with his partner, a native of Perth — to raise their daughter. This change influenced Lower, as well.
“I wasn’t here for a lot of the things that were happening during the pandemic,” he said. “Politically at that time, I was in Australia just watching it on TV from afar, I felt very removed from that. But I think it gave me some perspective writing the music.”
Around 2020, Booker and Segal would send tracks back and forth to one another. Booker rented an old space in Victoria Hall located in Fremantle, Australia. He holed up in this room every day just trying to make something happen.
“It was honestly a very strange experience,” he said “Just spending years alone and sending pieces of songs off to Kenny just hoping that we can pull it through, but it worked.”
He was inspired by experimental hip-hop including Armand Hammer and Segal, as well as the ambient scene coming of Europe, like Space Afrika and Felicia Atkinson and her label Shelter Press. You can hear those sonic influences on Lower.
“I spent a lot of time, from the last album and beyond that, just listening and trying to figure out what was going on in music and just seeing all the different pockets of things,” he said. “The beautiful thing about the internet is that it’s easy to do that now. I was finding people who just inspired me in different places and just wanted to put those things together. The album is about things that really spoke to me, and just trying to figure out how I can share those with people here.”
Another influence for Booker was New York hip-hop duo Mobb Deep, especially their third album Hell on Earth.
“When I was living out in LA, I was just playing that album for some reason over and over again,” he said. “I just kept singing along to it, and that never happens to me. But there is just something about the pacing and the melancholy vibe inspired me to keep writing.”
Producer Kenny Segal was able to bring Booker’s sonic vision to reality. The two worked together on the track “Doves,” featured on Armand Hammer’s 2023 record We Buy Diabetic Test Strips, and the song “Baby Steps” on Segal and Billy Woods’ critically acclaimed album, Maps. Booker talked about how Segal helped him create that sound that he was envisioning.
“We were trying to mix experimental hip-hop, singer/songwriter, ambient music, and bring them together in a way that felt like it wasn’t too much one of those things,” he said. “Kenny is like a rare producer that has experience with all of those genres. He was a huge Nine Inch Nails kind of rock guy when he was a kid. Then he went into drum and bass music and then went into hip-hop. It was like he was familiar with all the things that I was trying to pull together. I didn’t have to explain things to him, he knew what I was trying to do immediately. If a track was going a little too hip-hop, we could both push it more and like the ambient direction. If it was a little too ambient, we could push them more and to singer/songwriter.”
Outside of the experimental hip-hop and ambient leaning production, there’s also touch of neo soul when you hear songs like “Slow Dance In A Gay Bar.”
“That was probably the first song that we ever did, and that one was unlike the other ones,” he said. “The other ones were pieced together, but at that time, Kenny had just sent me the music for that, and I just wrote the song over it. That was the first time that we had finished something, and it came out in a way that we didn’t touch the entire time and it’s exactly like it was when we did it. It’s probably my favorite song on the album. I was inspired by a lot of that stuff. At the time, it felt like there was a big change in music where D’Angelo came out with Black Messiah, and then you had Solange with A Seat at The Table, and Frank Ocean with Blonde. It was just like; you got these black artists just making incredible statements with these albums. That was definitely something that I was looking at and trying to do in my own way.”
Booker says his songwriting has become more three-dimensional, trying stuff that is intimate, but also unknowable. Making things that are inspired by paintings, getting more into visual arts. He described this album compared to the previous two more layered than the writing that I was doing before
“This record feels like I’m finally in a place where you want to be as an artist,” he said. “Where it’s just like, I know that no one else could make this record. Only I could make this record and that’s where you want to be. I just hope to keep doing that, not to keep doing the same thing over and over again, but make records that’s like, ‘If you want this, you’re only going to get it from me.'”