Benjamin Booker, Beyond Recognition
The New Orleans singer, songwriter and producer sat down with Paste to discuss the life-affirming powers of Kerry James Marshall’s art, his intercontinental collaborations with Kenny Segal and his first album in seven years, LOWER.
Photo by Trenity Thomas
In the diasporic religion of Haitian, Dominican and Louisiana vodou/voodoo, there are spirits called lwa that speak to humans in dreams and divinity. There are Petwo and Rada lwa, meant to symbolize something transcendent, something akin to saints in Roman Catholicism. They live beneath bodies of water, at the bottom of seas and rivers. The lwa are intermediaries between a supreme creator god and humanity, offering humans protection, healing and wisdom through possession in exchange for ritual sacrifice and ceremony. Every lwa is unique, understood through colors, days of the week and talismans. Vodouists say they are easily angered, but can be very loyal if devoted to correctly. Deriving from the Yoruba language in Niger-Congo, and phonetically identical in French and Creole, “lwa” sounds like “lower,” if it rolls off your tongue just right. In a street of blood, a lwa arrives by fire at night; “I want the world,” Benjamin Booker sings on his new record, LOWER. “I wanna live a good life.”
At the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles in 2017, Booker visited a Kerry James Marshall retrospective. Marshall’s penchant comes from making art derived from this phrase in Paul Garon’s book Blues and the Poetic Spirit: “Magic is evoked when frustration threatens desire.” He named one of his paintings after it, intrigued by voodoo symbolism, levitation and the Black experience in the United States, how Black people blended Western and African traditions. His work is cabalistic and magical, a tradition as vivid as it is folkloric and referential. He once said of the works of Constantin Brâncuși, Sam Doyle, Bill Trayler and Giotto, “It’s all material that can be combined to make something that nobody’s seen before.” All of the change in Booker’s life, he says, can be attributed to seeing Marshall’s exhibit. He wanted to “live that kind of life,” a life of magic and purpose.
“It’s all material that can be combined to make something that nobody’s seen before” is synthesized into an album like LOWER, Booker’s attempt at patching incongruous elements into something ridiculous—at making something in-between the divine and the ordinary. There was no blueprint, but the directions of Mobb Deep’s Hell on Earth and the Jesus and Mary Chain’s Psychocandy lingered nearby. “I realized that the combination of heavily distorted sounds mixed with boom-bap hip-hop does not exist,” Booker says. “You can’t find that. I remember telling the guy who ran my management company, I showed him a song and he was like, ‘I like this song.’ And I was like, ‘I think I’m going to throw some distorted guitar and boom-bap drums on it,’ and he laughed. I was like, ‘Yes, exactly.’ The idea of it just sounded ridiculous.” Once he made “LWA IN THE TRAILER PARK,” Booker had finally made the thing he’d wanted to hear for himself and no one else.
Back when I was still a Pandora Radio stumper in 2014, I discovered Benjamin Booker’s work through the shuffle of a rock station—I want to say it was Cage the Elephant Radio, or something of the like. I owe a lot to Pandora, admittedly; I wouldn’t have heard Frank Ocean’s “Pyramids” for the first time without it. It was good for algorithmic discovery, and it felt much more spectacular back then. The auto-play feature on Spotify and Apple Music just don’t hit like that nowadays. But Pandora pointed me towards a song of Booker’s, “Violent Shiver.” I was hooked immediately, sucked into the god-fearing, guitar-toting explosions like it was this feverish, irresistible tractor beam. This was my taste at the peak of its “loud guitars” era. Booker had this aura about him, punched into view thanks to his raspy, shredded howl. He just had a way of playing that pulled something out of me. 11 years on and I still can’t quite put a finger on what.
Booker used to go around interviewing funeral home directors in Gainesville, where he was studying journalism at the University of Florida. He had a knack for talking with people. It was, more than a decade ago now, a big reason he kicked up a music career—talking to people about their craft, it became a holistic, mutually-gainful vocation. Booker found his bag: interviewing punk bands, especially his favorite band (at least once upon a time), No Age. Around 2012, after getting some sage advice from Chuck Klosterman, he began writing his own music, bringing “Wicked Waters” and “Have You Seen My Son” to life, along with “Spoon Out My Eyeballs” and, yes, “Violet Shiver.” He signed with the great ATO Records, joining the likes of Hurray for the Riff Raff and Margaret Glaspy, and the story goes that Jon Salter signed Booker after watching the Tampa-bread picker play a half-hour gig.
I liked Booker’s early material because I’d grown up listening to Motown, Wilson Pickett, Otis Redding and Booker T. & the MGs. I also liked Booker’s early material because, at age 16, I was starting to get stoked on punk music. Those worlds collided like gold on Benjamin Booker, a record so money it landed him at Coachella, Bonnaroo, Governor’s Ball, Primavera Sound, and on bills with Parquet Courts, Courtney Barnett and Bully. When Jack White went on his Lazaretto Tour, he brought Booker along with him. Few rock musicians were as interesting 10 years ago as Booker was.
His stardom rose so high he got Mavis Staples on a joint with him two years later. In fact, his entire sophomore album—Witness—was special, vaulting him into a reputation so meteoric that he was tapped as the opening act for three Neil Young gigs in the Midwest. And Witness feels as miraculous now as it did the first time I heard it. The title track and “Believe” arrived as these full-bodied ensemble pieces, dappled with string sections and vibrato pitch shifts. It was a gesture of change for Booker, who’d graduated from angular, bluesy tones and turned towards politicking, envelope-pushing gospel music. The move may have angered some of Booker’s faithful audience, and Witness may sound lifetimes away from LOWER, but the two records share a similar sense of defiance and social commentary.
But, of course, Booker all but disappeared by the end of the 2010s. His career went radio-silent. All we had were the two LPs and the self-released Waiting Ones EP, and I devoured them over and over and over again. After Witness came out, Booker gave himself permission to explore and see what he liked. He became more precious with his guitar, feeling “less tethered to riffs and playing notes” and becoming more interested in using the instrument as a way to articulate a feeling than as a weapon of garage-rock revivalism. “I was trying to get to something else,” he says. “When I first started playing music, it was the first 12 songs I had ever written. I didn’t think past one record, so when it came to do the second one, it felt like a very transitional record—where it was like, ‘I don’t know what I’m going to do, but I want to do something else.’” Booker, like a lot of us, had been using blogs to build out his own taste, but he wanted something more—he wanted to find the pockets that music journalists weren’t writing about. So he did the work, spending hours combing through African and Brazilian records, Chicago footwork and European ambient.
When he made his debut album, Booker says that he had a clear, literal vision of what he wanted it to be. He remembers fixating on this split-second image of him playing on a stage with the exact vibe the songs wound up catering to. But once the time came to make Witness, Booker didn’t know where to go. “I was lucky,” he admits. “I had songs that I felt were strong but, stylistically, I was trying to find something more.” You can hear elements of LOWER on that record, especially during “Witness,” which flashes glimpses of this Tribe Called Quest, boom-bap style mixed with a crushing, fuzzy, melodiless soundscape.
But seven years ago, those ideas didn’t feel nearly as realized as they do now. “I just wanted to write songs that I felt represented me in some way, that I enjoyed listening to and enjoyed playing,” Booker says. Plus, there was pressure on him detouring towards a style of music that was “safe” to make—from suit-type people, as he puts it. “I had to get away from all of those things. I couldn’t have survived in that world, and it had only just begun to happen.” He got to do what he wanted on Benjamin Booker and Witness, he clarifies, but he could see what was waiting for him. “It was like, ‘Oh, my God, this is only going to get way worse. And I don’t want to be in this at all.’”
So Booker ditched the label game and upped his standards on LOWER. He wanted the songs to feel lyrically three-dimensional, combining elements from different genres in a way that felt novel. “That got me excited, and it sounded like me, not like other people,” he says. “I wanted to get farther and farther away.” The company Booker now keeps has changed, too. He’s not running around with Jack White anymore, instead collaborating with Segal and Armand Hammer’s billy woods and E L U C I D. “I had to figure out the place I wanted to be in music,” he explains. “You have to decide what kind of musician you want to be. [In 2014], I was young. I was jumping into it without any thought, which is why I liked it. It’s very natural, raw.”
But Booker realized that he didn’t feel excited in that world. He wanted this journey to feel like an adventure, as if he was on the edge of something new or pushing something. “To me, that was a place I thought would be a lot more exciting, and it is more exciting for me. I appreciate people who are great songwriters and can make you feel something very strong with just a guitar and their voice.” Booker pauses, before calling to mind the proverb of Kerry James Marshall. “I wanted to make music that people couldn’t have made 10 years before.”
Back in the late 2010s, Booker was living in Los Angeles. He says it felt like, at least while he was there, an epicenter of music, especially before the pandemic hit. Even now, it’s a city full of home studios and gigs and folks making art everywhere they can. He tells me he’d never been exposed to music like that until he got to the West Coast. “I don’t hangout with anybody, I don’t really talk to anybody. I think that, just being there, I was around a lot more people than I’m normally around. And I was seeing a lot more.” He picked up skateboarding, spending his time downtown. It was helpful, he says, because of the attitude. “Not wanting to go with what is accepted,” he gestures, “I just wanted to do something that felt risky, less safe than what I was doing before.”
Booker used to live one street over from Mac DeMarco, who had a TASCAM-388 at his house, which he used to make Another One in 2015. “I asked him one day if I could take it, and he was like, ‘Yeah, it’s yours,’” Booker remembers. “He helped me carry it over to my apartment, and then I recorded a song that I was working on at the time called ‘Black Disco.’ I ended up putting out a different version of it. But it was the first time that I had recorded something, like a full song on my own, where I was like, ‘Wow this really sounds like a record.’” But that TASCAM, according to Booker, was so shitty it would break all the time. “I think that’s why Mac didn’t mind getting rid of it,” he laughs.
At the end of 2019, Booker and his partner moved to her native Perth and raised their daughter together in the Fremantle region of the western coast. There, he decided to buy a laptop and go as simple as possible. Whatever his third record became would happen without a studio, and a global pandemic locked that revelation into place. He’d watched a black metal documentary and especially enjoyed watching Mayhem go into a store and ask for the shittiest mic the owner had. It was a kind of attitude that shaped LOWER, this belief that you could make a brand new sound without spending a dime. “I was like, ‘I’m not going to buy any equipment. I’m not doing anything. I’m just going to use what’s in the computer. I’m plugging my guitar directly into the computer. I have a $200 microphone, I’m not buying anything else.’”
Few artists in recent memory have re-invented themselves like Booker has on LOWER, an album that will shock its audience. On “SAME KIND OF LONELY,” an audio sample of a school shooting dissolves into a clip of his daughter cooing. The idea was to evoke loneliness, “existence and the natural world” and how “things that start off so beautiful are often twisted into something unsettling or sinister.” Bookers says that “you don’t find that a bunch of school shooters are hanging out with a lot of people,” admitting that, once the idea popped into his head, it felt immediately correct.
Some listeners might recognize the screams and feel put off by them, but Booker wanted it to reflect reality—and he got there by making it this jarring, out-of-the-blue shift 3/4ths of the way into the album. “You’re trying to do new things,” he contends, “but to also do them intentionally, for them to have a purpose.” Whether it’s the danger of a band like the Jesus and Mary Chain or Mobb Deep’s sermons on crime set to heavy drums, there’s an element of violence that runs throughout LOWER and the sounds that helped invent it. “SAME KIND OF LONELY” is an immediate progeny of that fantasy, in how Booker treated the guitar distortion in the second verse like a DJ would by cutting it in and out. He uses a filter to reconfigure its muddy, closed-off feeling into this big, open sound by the verse’s end.
To do that, Booker needed a descendant of the Mobb Deep sound in the trenches with him, and it was Kenny Segal who answered the call. In fact, Segal, who has previously worked with the likes of R.A.P. Ferreira, Armand Hammer, Open Mike Eagle and Serengeti, was the only guy right for the project, Booker says. “He has a rock background from when he was younger. He used to be into Nine Inch Nails and In Utero, which was a reference for this record, the noise-pop thing.” Segal has this rich history with electronica and drum and bass, too. Booker admits that he has limitations that Segal can fill in the blanks of. “It wasn’t hard to make things that felt new to us,” he says.
The duo had no time limit on what they were making, so everything could “be inspired.” They put LOWER together piece by piece, sending stems and demos back and forth intercontinentally between Australia and the United States. It was liberating for Booker, who relished the opportunity to dig and dig and dig just to find parts, textures and ideas that felt exciting to him and Segal, rather than churning out material in a studio during paid-for hours. “That took a long time, because every sound that you hear on here is something that [made us say], ‘Whoa,’ at some point. I wanted it to be like that. I think, if you don’t have that kind of reaction to the other things that you’re making, other people aren’t going to have that reaction.”
The sequencing on LOWER is tangential, as listeners are transported from a song about a lwa descending upon a trailer park to “SLOW DANCE IN A GAY BAR,” Booker’s woozy waltz about the impossible happening in the wake of a slow death, about a place where the “sun shines brighter and the air smells sweet like honey.” “SLOW DANCE IN A GAY BAR” is a mirage of platitudes, of Booker “hanging out in gay bars, just to see another me,” declaring that he “could be a good man” despite not being used to doing this. The push and pull of violence of LOWER begins to simmer into a kiss amid the “bones and rotting flesh” of a slow expiration. “I just want someone to see me,” Booker croons in a twilight-dim hush. “I am beginning to see the beauty all around me.” It’s a swell of clarity on an album full of questions. It’s wounded and aching. A guitar string gets plucked through tender, Segal-made beats. A keyboard twinkles like a dainty sunrise. Even at its most sacred, LOWER is a challenge.
And through the thrums of razor-blade guitars and a dense drumbeat you can feel deep in your lungs during “BLACK OPPS,” Booker insists that “they’ll kill you while you sleep.” There’s a sweetness to “POMPEII STATUES” masking a sinister underglow of swirling, burning caustic drones. The acoustic “REBECCA LATIMER FELTON TAKES A BBC” is named after the first woman and last slave owner to serve in the United States Senate (she was also only a senator for one day) and riffs on self-flagellation, pleasure and racism (“You watched me from the porch and touched yourself, didn’t you? The pain you must have felt watching me go home at night to love, real love”) and a diss that’ll rattle your insides (“Those eyes, those thighs, were you never much to see? Tired eyes and skin like concrete, she could melt the ice caps with that beautiful smile”). There’s even a line, “Did your husband hate you, too?,” that Booker emphasizes with a drum machine click that sounds like a belt hitting somebody’s bare ass.
LOWER can make for a maddening listen. It is, all at once, full of air yet claustrophobic. The songs often—and in colorful ways—illustrate breaking points. They’re intimate and brutal, juxtaposing delicacy with wretched banalities. For somebody like Booker, who made one of the best garage rock albums 10 years ago and one of the best soul albums seven years ago, these 11 songs resist the dogma of genre and curse the bliss of settling. He wants you to hear his lips quiver and voice stumble while he sings “I want more than a dream” over and over and over again near the end of “HEAVY ON MY MIND.” He wants you to feel uncomfortable within the deafening chatter of the Grand Central Market in Los Angeles, which he layers in the arrangement of “HOPE FOR THE NIGHT TIME,” only to melt into a splendid, summery, sprawling loop of synths, reggae fusion drums and nylon plucks. The guitar effervescence on “SHOW AND TELL” reminds me of that which sweetens Sugar Ray’s “When It’s Over,” until the melody digresses into this 10-inch-thick wash of warping riffs. “Life is contagious,” Booker concludes by the record’s end. I get closer to God every time I hear him sing it.
After finishing LOWER, Segal and Booker celebrated by co-producing the Armand Hammer song “Doves,” a rap track without percussion, guitar and hardly any rapping on it. Instead, Booker gospelizes for a few minutes over a muted piano melody, glitchy background intoning and a swarming, atmospheric static. As the distortion begins to build and Booker’s vocals fade, billy woods and E L U C I D come in with verses of their own, addressing the listener like it’s a spoken-word jam. “Doves” is particularly beautiful but equally haunted and touched with grief, and Booker contends that it’s still the best thing he and the Segal have done together—calling it a culmination of their work together on LOWER. I ask him if there’s a world where he, Segal and Armand Hammer make an entire record together. “It’s possible,” he replies. I’ll take it.
Booker returned to New Orleans in 2023, to the city he was living in when his first album came out 10 years ago. The music scene there is a bit more grounded; it’s a lot of acts hunching over microphones in dank bars, singers trying to sound louder than the patrons talking over them. But, at the same time, there’s something freeing about a place like that, where everyone is singing and there is no real template for success. Buskers fill the streets and the music sounds so loud it must be falling from the sky. To be there is to know what possibility exists beyond the bold of darkness.
Near the end of our conversation, he again recalls that TASCAM-388 that DeMarco gave him all those years ago. “He said, ‘This will change your life.’ He was like, ‘Recording yourself will change your life,’ and he was right,” Booker says. “I think that, just having such a strong connection to the music, because you’re so involved in it, and the more involved in it you are, the more of a connection you have to it. Doing the first record, I had that kind of experience. And I just wanted to have it even more.” So, when he was making LOWER, Booker wanted to feel the way that he felt when he was younger and listening to TV On the Radio and Deerhunter, when he heard something and said, “I don’t recognize this.” And I won’t bullshit you, this album is a what-the-fuck served on a platter of gnarly, bit-crushed overwhelm. It sounds like a magical language, one that blisters like a siren in the context of Booker’s sacrifice. But that shouldn’t surprise anyone. This is the same guy who dropped a well-placed fuck in the company of Mavis Staples. To make an album like this, you’d have to be possessed.
Matt Mitchell is Paste’s music editor, reporting from their home in Northeast Ohio.