New York, NY (Top40 Charts) There are singer-songwriters, and there are troubadours. Singer-songwriters are sensitive, polished souls, sharing their journal entries with the world, whereas troubadours do their best just to stay out of jail. And in the wake of Ben de la Cour's astonishing new record, Shadow Land, you can add his name to the top of the list of younger troubadours to whom this ever-so-occasionally poisoned chalice is being passed. "Swan Dive" is one of the stand out tracks from his album, and he is now unveiling a new video.
Shadow Land shimmers - it's both terrifying and soothing, suffused with honesty, craft and a rare soul-baring fearlessness with enough surprises to keep the listener guessing. It gets down and dirty with electric guitar but also features Ben's diffident fingerpicking in quieter moments. Ultimately, it is a darkly beautiful meditation on what it means to be human. Ben's voice renders raw emotion with authority as he recounts tales of suspicious characters, lost love, murder, bank robbers, suicides, mental illness and ghoul-haunted pool halls. On the brilliant "
From Now On", he sings "it's hard to hold a candle / in a wind so wild and strong." That one line sums up the troubadour's life about as well as anything ever said before.
To say Ben has lived an eventful life in the course of keeping that flame lit is to put it mildly. As young man, he was a successful amateur boxer who was playing New York City dives like CBGB with his brother a decade before he could legally drink. There were arrests, homes in tough neighborhoods all over the world, countless false starts and stays in psychiatric hospitals and rehabs as Ben battled with mental health and substance abuse issues. But in 2013 he finally found himself in East Nashville, and this year saw the release of far and away the best of his four albums - Shadow Land.
Shadow Land comes in steaming with "God's Only Son", a gut-bucket western about a bank-robbing drifter who may or may not believe he is the messiah that sounds like Ennio Morricone being fed through a meat grinder. "High Heels Down the Holler" is Appalachian gothic at its finest; an unsettling, rough and twisted tale that features a threatening fiddle weaving its way like a water moccasin through grimy, hypnotic slide guitar. On "In God We Trust... All
Others Pay Cash" Ben's scathing put-down of corporate crooks "putting candles on dog shit and calling it cake" seethes alongside a band channeling "Stop Breaking Down." On the other side of the fence are the delicate, atmospheric "Amazing
Grace (Slight Return)" and "The Last Chance Farm", a heartbreaking tale about Ben's first day in rehab.
Ben turns on a dime on "Basin Lounge", all pure jittery New York Dolls vibe highlighted by a boogie-woogie piano that would make Jerry Lee proud and a snarling guitar that brings to mind Joe Strummer's The 101ers. One of the album's crowning moments arrives with "Swan Dive", a gorgeous feat of narrative storytelling. A gentle waltz, it tells a shattering tale of lost love and suicide, questioning how close to the edge we really are. When he sings, "My heart does a swan dive, right out of my chest, into a river of sorrow," the desolation is palpable. The final track on the album, "Valley of the Moon", is a terrifying meditation on what Jack London referred to as the 'white logic' of alcohol-induced psychosis, while simultaneously contemplating Chuang Tzu's meditation on material transformation in a voice as cold and dead as the man in the moon himself.
Ben de la Cour's music has been featured on SiriusXM Outlaw Country, BBC
Radio and NPR while receiving high praise from American Songwriter,
Maverick Magazine, No Depression, Twangville,
Dusted Magazine and Daytrotter amongst others. He is a former Kerrville New Folk Winner and pre-COVID he spent over a hundred days a year on the road touring the U.S, Canada,
Europe and Australia.
