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Benjy
Ferree is one of those chaps that you meet once in a lifetime
and think to yourself that maybe they’re made of pixie
dust, the spirits of pied pipers, drifters, vagabonds and explorers,
jet fuel and the different pieces of a galaxy that were once
floating and airborne and are now shaped into a body of some
kind that goes by a name. He’s a force and a comfortably
overpowering character who dives into a persona that is so magnificent
because it’s just him being himself, not him portraying
a man who’s portraying a bluff. He’s kind of blinding
in all that he’s got going on at the same time and he
seems like he’d be a bottomless well of stories about
those interesting people he’s met in the strangest places.
The debut album, Leaving the Nest, by this man – an actor
who was pitted and chewed up by Los Angeles, sending him back
east – is a collection of disparate climates, periods
and people, all harnessed by a candied voice and Ferree’s
imaginative play with instrumentation. The subject matter wanders
through time and predicament, from the scandalous secret love
affair between Thomas Jefferson and his slave, Sally Hemings,
to a present day musing about a presidential motorcade. It’s
a post-modern take on folk music, taking a back porch/countrified
soap opera – the succulent gossip and the dramatic drippings
– and turning it into a prism that is motored by colorful
shreds of detail and development both highly serious and aloof
at the same time. There’s a sense that perfection isn’t
the end goal, but the chance to move something through a turn
of verse or phrase is. Ferree’s found a new home in Washington,
D.C. and the District of Columbia is a lyrical playground, supplying
him with countless fodder for songs that even when they’re
set presently send off a wave of historical ambrosia. He admits
to going walking around Arlington National Cemetery for the
fun of it and he perceives all of the past around him. He feels
the ghosts breathing heavy against his bare skin and he inhales
all that has come before him, trying to understand it and put
it in the proper context that he needs it to be in. Ferree walking
with ghosts – the imagined picture of the guy strolling
through the cemetery on a day when the sun’s streaming
through the sky and turning the leaves on trees yellow because
it’s so bright, side-by-side with an aberration is fun.
He probably makes those ghosts want to live again, maybe come
to one of his shows or just shoot the shit with him for a few
days.
-Sean Moeller of Daytrotter |
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Leaving
The Nest
Domino Records
2007 |
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