I seem to constantly say this, but bushy-bearded Ben Bridwell (alliteration ahoy!) from Band of Horses reeeally was a nice guy. Have I ever had a grumpy interviewee, you ask? Well, James Lavelle wasn't the most loquacious individual, neither was the bass player from Phoenix. Anyway, Ben was friendly and had a strong passion from Australian music, which was nice to find.
Somewhere along the line, I skipped over Band of Horses and their debut record Everything All The Time. Certainly the blogosphere didn’t: Tiny Mix Tapes gave it a staggering 4.5 out of 5, Drowned in Sound crowned it with an 8, and home of the superfluous review, Pitchfork, deemed it worthy of 8.8 out of 10. Then I stumbled upon it myself, in almost epiphanous circumstances.
But now the band has graduated from indie-cool to just plain cool, harbouring a sound that simultaneously evokes images of early Neil Young and the oft-mentioned My Morning Jacket. Ben Bridwell is the affable and energetic brains behind Band of Horses. It’s been around a year and half since his band released their first record, and now they return with Cease To Begin, an album that picks up where the first left off. On the phone from Los Angeles, he’s settling in for a marathon interview schedule, and he’s surprisingly well-versed in Australian music, professing love for Augie March, The Triffids, “Rosie Tatt”, but leaves his utmost adoration for their upcoming touring partners, The Drones. “God I’m such a big fan of that band,” he beams.
Much has changed in the life of Ben Bridwell since his time in underground faves Carissa’s Wierd. Nowadays he sports a rather bushy beard, and his every move is salacious material for bloggers the world over, such as his now infamous run-in with a fan called Rosemary at a show in San Diego earlier this year. He’s also lost his partner in crime, former Carissa member and original equine guitarist, Mat Brooke. Bridwell says it affected the writing process for Cease to Begin, “but even with the first record, most [of the songs] had been written before Mat joined the band, so I was already pretty warmed up to the idea that I was going to have to write a new record. Or I was going to, not have to I guess. So I dunno, I was really excited just to be writing the songs that came out.”
Another change for Bridwell was moving south, from Seattle back to his home state of South Carolina, to the splendidly-named town of Mt Pleasant. Bridwell offers that the move did influence the record, but says “I guess it helped in the fact that I finally had some time alone. In Seattle, I would always be living with so many people and I could never feel like I was really alone so it was just good to have some solitude and I dunno, some time just to really dive deep into it.”
Is he a creature of solitude? “I can be,” Bridwell answers. “You know, it’s funny. At this point in my life I don’t own my life; there’s too many people that depend on me at all times. I don’t really feel like I have personal time anymore again. But at the same time it’s probably not the most healthy thing for me to be alone because no one sees me get as drunk as I can get [laughs].”
We wax lyrical about the joys of alcohol, with Bridwell expressing his love of beer and whisky: “It’s really unfortunate that they’re so good,” he laughs. When I suggest that the band could boost their merchandise sales by offering fans a Band of Horses cocktail, he immediately beams: “We’ve thought about doing a Band of Horses beer that… like, certain levels of the beer are a different pitch tone that you can blow into and play like a song or whatever. That’d be kinda cool.”
What’s even cooler, and that actually exists, is Asheville’s Echo Mountain Studios, where the band recorded the new album. Abandoned long ago by its original inhabitant (“Maybe IRS came after him, or he wasn’t paying his taxes, or some money fraud issue came up,” Bridwell proffers), the building is a majestically grand, old Baptist church which has been turned into a recording studio. It’s also home to an Evil Knievel pinball machine, and Bridwell is instantly laughing when I mention the game.
“God, I have a fucking crazy story for you,” he says before launching into a narrative about how studio owner Steve Wilmans had painfully waited for the daredevil to travel through Asheville just so he could get part of the machine signed. “One day, the new cleaning crew he had hired, they were a Mexican couple and they didn’t really speak very good English. And so he made sure to tell them, he pointed at the signature and he was like ‘No clean! Do not clean this pinball machine!’ Next day he comes in, sure enough, she had wiped it right clean. It’s so funny, that game is fantastic but I can tell that Steve’s a bit pained when he looks at it.”
There’s an air of enjoyment about everything Bridwell does. When I ask him if he felt pressure towards writing the follow-up to an internationally-renowned debut, he dismisses it by saying “I just tried not to think about that. We kind of defy all the odds, don’t we? We just kind of come out of nowhere and write a first record, ends up doing really well and then don’t give a shit that much for the second one, take it easy on it and then look at it – free and fun for everyone!”
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