A CONVERSATION WITH... BEN GOLDSMITH
What do you get when you combine a 7-instrument-playing New Yorker and a proud eavesdropper? Ben Goldsmith (now in Nashville).
“I can’t imagine myself doing anything else.”
Where have I heard this before?
It starts with an eight-minute indie documentary in March 2020, introducing the world to the then-14-year-old Ben who talks about how his obsession with music grows daily and how he’ll gladly have it that way.
And it continues in an interview, four years later, a few hours before his headline show in London’s Courtyard Theatre. Four years later and beyond, I’m sure that sentence will only be said a million more times with the same love and excitement 14-year-old Ben had.
Considering his first word was ‘Duke’ (after the Stevie Wonder song) and he grew up in a musical family, it’s no surprise that the sapling of a love for music was always there.
But as the years have gone on, and the hours spent creating on guitars, pianos, drums, mandolin, bass, and even occasionally the banjo, has rapidly increased, Ben still wants people to know he is some guy from New York City. He loves food, loves to yap, and loves to eavesdrop on the subway.
“I am such an eavesdropper,” he laughs, “as much as I hate to admit it. When we were on the tube coming in, I was listening to people talk and taking notes from their conversations. And it’s like ‘Oh, that’s a sick title’ or idea or I’ll just listen just to listen. It’s almost my job to be an observer and a listener, so I’ll just try and look for the small details in everyday life. I won’t always write a song about it but I’ll always at least jot it down. It’ll always be there, just in case. That’s my main source of inspiration as a songwriter. The easy and instinctual of life really inspire me creatively.”
He and his songs strike a balance between the world he’s experienced and one he has yet to experience. “I like dreaming up ideas and things that come to my head but I really like talking about things that go on in my life. Because there’s not really a big difference between who I am as an artist and as a person. That’s what makes sense for me. It’s not Stefani and Lady Gaga, it’s just Ben.”
Well, Ben and his closest friends. “A large part of my identity is my friend group, these people I’ve known since I was six or seven. My best friends like Tommy, Hunter, Jeremy, Tyler, Eisen, all those guys, they’ve helped me stay grounded. They don’t know me as ‘Ben the musician’, they know me as the guy they play basketball with or watch football with. They’re part of who I am, and so is my family. They’re so supportive and incredible. Having your roots close and knowing who you are is a big thing to me.”
Any differences for Ben lie within what instrument and genre he uses to get his stories across. Using and layering the various instruments allows each instrument to tell a story with a different perspective than it might have had just on the guitar or piano. “I don’t want to write songs with the same guitar loop on it. I want to mix it up. I have some songs that are more rock’n’roll, more folk-inspired like Bob Dylan and Paul Simon, and then there are the more orchestral songs and ballads. It’s multi-dimensional. I want to be an artist who has songs that take people on a roller-coaster, especially in a live show! All my songs I write, I visualise for a live show. That’s where it’s best to experience my music and me.”
So if you start the roller-coaster with a ballad, you strap in with ‘Look On’, a song that feels like home. “That song is my favourite because I’m a music nerd and it has one of my favourite melodies. It also comes from a place near and dear to my heart. My mom had a really tough battle with cancer and I wrote that song, weirdly, as motivation for her with everything going on. Producing it with my friend, Alex Hope, was incredible because it was a safe space to make something as special as that for me.”
She beat it, by the way.
And if you go up the roller coaster, you can find the country-inspired, acoustic guitar-heavy, ‘I miss NYC’, a self-explanatory title. He wrote that song for his friends when he left NYC for Nashville, co-written with Tiffany Johnson, a singer who left her home in South Dakota for Nashville, too. “Sharing stories with her about our friends back home added another layer to it. It’s a self-explanatory song, but the introduction comes from when I was on FaceTime with my friend Tyler and I knew I had to write this song for my buddies back home. I was missing certain things but I knew I had to move and do what I needed to do, too.”
One of the songs at the top of the roller coaster is ‘Wish We Never Met’, a punching and angsty rock’n’roll banger that reflects on a situationship gone wrong. It’s a song you could imagine screaming along to at one of his shows or in the mirror after you just ended things with someone.
Going around the loops of the rollercoaster, you can hear songs like the passionate ballad-turned-funk ‘Crazy’, ‘Love Again’, with its upbeat and pop-inspired instrumentals and relatable heartbreaking lyrics, and ‘Treetops’, an orchestral and folksy comforting tune.
But all of his music, especially within his latest album, The Start of Something Beautiful, has songs across the genre spectrum. But while his first album, The World Between My Ears, was him getting on his feet and there are songs from his early teenage years, this album is a much more accurate reflection of who he is, what he’s gone through, and what he’s been a witness to in his relationships.
“I just want to keep putting out music, like how Zach Bryan does. There will be times where I want to take a break, pull an Adele and disappear for five years, but I do love that Zach just doesn’t care. He keeps putting out music and he’s guided by his voice. I want to do that, I want to keep putting out and making music.”
And so he’s not losing steam after releasing his second album — he’s tackling his own Mount Everests and trying to experiment even more with his music. One of his new challenges is trying to learn the cello, something he deems the greatest string instrument of all time. “One of my super-talented songwriting buddies, Aiden Halliday, just bought a cello for a studio. I’ve been wanting to learn the cello for the longest time because there’s so much you can do with it! I love putting strings on my ballads and I just think that if I can play guitar, I can learn the cello too. I just have to get the bowing down.”
But when he’s not using his time to write songs almost every other day, he will gladly use that time to shout from the treetops about the talent of other musicians and creatives — regardless if he knows them or not.