Ben Rogers

"With a whisky-grizzled voice that competes with Tom Waits's, and singing the stories of the down and out and dispossessed, Ben Rogers could be the 21st century reincarnation of Woody Guthrie. Lost Stories:Volume One tells universal tales of love, death and murder with the authority of an Old Testament prophet." - R2 (Rock 'n' Reel) Magazine

THERE ARE GOLD-RUSH killers, jailbirds in ’Nam, and jealous men with murder on their mind in Ben Rogers’s Lost Stories: Volume 1. But the man’s dark charisma is something you need to experience live to fully appreciate. He’s like a gravity well pulling you into a black-and-white picture from a different century. - The Georgia Straight

If you took half the raw talent in Vancouver's young roots scene and added it together, you'd probably still fall short of one Ben Rogers. You need to see him live to catch the dark, onstage charisma, but his spooked sounding baritone comes through loud and scary on the newly released Lost Stories: Volume 1, as does the gift for spinning his own private Americana on tracks like opener, "The Dealer."

Rogers also asks a lot of the listener when, in his most affected performance, he starts an album with the line, "I was born in Carolina, raised with a heavy hand..." Because, you know, he wasn't. We're left to decide whether or not we buy the range of Guthrie-to-Springsteen archetypes Rogers adopts across the record -- murderous cuckold in "The Cheatin' Kind"; a convict sent to Vietnam in "Jailbird Song"; gold panning killer in "The Devil's Crop (500 Miles)" -- or who he's speaking for besides his own fertile imagination.

But then we also have tracks like "Once a Wife, Twice a Widow," in which Lazarus and Ulysses somehow get folded into Rogers' own personal mythology, or "Kingdom Come," a gospel number that trails off – rather untraditionally -- into a cloud of ominous dissonance. I'm still trying to figure out what he's getting at with the lady who "rules with an iron tampon" in "Lay it Down," but it's in these quirks and outré moments that I feel like I'm hearing the real artist, and not a master impressionist.

LISTEN TO THIS:
Ben Rogers - "The Bums of Easy Street"

To put it another way, Rogers has plunked himself inside a genre that values authenticity even more than a voice that stops you dead or songwriting chops that could open the door to a nice publishing deal. If Lost Stories is the last thing he ever did, it would be an enormous achievement, but I hope Ben Rogers continues to write from experiences closer to his own home -- as he does to powerful effect on "Cowboys and Indians." There are plenty more damaged souls and grim campfire tales right here in our backyard that could use his voice and sensitivity.

By Adrian Mack, 31 Jan 2013, TheTyee.ca - The Tyee

A song of Ben Rogers that I’d like to showcase is “The Dealer”. This track does a great job expressing the description of his style, and will blow you away. ”The Dealer” (below) is off his most recent album, Lost Stories, which was released today. Ben Rogers has a voice that will captivate you from the start and leave you wanting more. Don’t just take it from me, press play. - Human Fankind

"I've met Ben Rogers a couple of times and also listened to some of his songs. He's an impressive guy; whether it's his style, dedication or his music you looke. you know he's the real thing.
His lyrics are among the best I've heard." - Max Martin, Songwriter/Producer

I missed the first round of critical praise that was rightfully heaped on Vancouver roots singer-songwriter Ben Rogers in 2010. My compatriots at You Crazy Dreamer, Herohill and Slowcoustic all piled on understandably. When I came across what appears to be a new album (or ep) called Lost Stories I knew I didn’t want to wait. I contacted Ben yesterday and the post is up today.

Ben Rogers is living in the past and you can hear it on this unsettling collection of murder songs and folk tales. His voice is whiskey soaked and reminds me of what a young Malcolm Holcombe must have sounded like (before his voice was savaged by cigaretts, liquor, and time). Rogers’ lyrics are poetic and contain images Leonard Cohen would be proud of (listen to “Lay It Down” on Bandcamp). I could drop a few more names (the Pogues, Tom Waits) but by now you get the drift.

More info can be found on Bandcamp… - http://www.songsillinois.net/

After hearing about Ben and delving into what he was all about I found myself liking the man more and more. Ben has an unmistakeable timbre of a voice, not that disimilar to Bob Dylan, he has the stage presence to carry it off as well. - Folk Radio UK

An incredible talent was discovered last night at the Prince Albert in Brighton. No, it wasn't Luke Doucet. The assemblage were already aware of his prowess. The discovery was of Ben Rogers. He could, if given a decent chance, turn out to be one of the best singer/songwriters for a generation. I kid you not. He is that good. Add to the songwriting his deep expressive voice and you have a sure fire winner if there is any justice left in this world!  - American Roots UK

Ben Rogers has a voice like a warm deep bath after a long cold day, a voice you can sink into and relish. He tells you stories, he summons up images of people living real lives. He doesn’t turn his head away from the realities of urban life, such songs as ‘The Dealer’ bear witness to that but he can also conjure up the pains and struggles of the past with the skill of a vocal shaman. He also made us laugh at ourselves, at the ridiculous, when to be human sometimes means perpetually skidding on a banana skin into an oncoming emotional truck. The tenderness of some of his songs, especially those inspired by his grandfathers, never wallow in sentiment, instead they celebrate those moments of real connection with what it means to love someone; that acknowledgement of something that is both fragile and yet enduring. He sings like a man who lives to sing and share his stories, the audience loved him because they instinctively knew that they were getting the real deal, someone who lives what he sings, who doesn’t fake it. - CB1 Poetry (Cambridge, UK)

With his best Bob Dylan sneer, Rogers belted out grungy folk-country tunes whose lyrics ranged from Cash-esque run-ins with the law to James Joyce references. Along the way, he broke a few strings, discarded an acoustic guitar that wouldn’t play through the P.A., sorted out some technical issues with the replacement guitar (“How do you turn this shit down? This is folk music!”), and for good measure threw in a terrific cover of Rancid’s “Time Bomb.” There’s just something about hearing the word “Cadillac” in a southern twang. The trio’s set was highlighted by the slow-burning “Born to Move,” reminiscent of the Velvet Underground’s “Heroin,” both in Rogers’ spoke-sung vocals, with the gradual build from muted ambience to all out cacophony, and in its haunting, surreal beauty. - Port City Lights

Wow. Part of the pleasure of listening to this Vancouver singer songwriter's record is that you never know what he'll do next... Ben Rogers could be advancing big time...(He) lists everybody from Tom Waits, Johnny Cash and Marcel Duchamp as influences and, sure 'nuff, you can hear it in the music, fresh but well steeped. - The Vancouver Province

"Ben's voice stands front and center. Even when he shifts into a more Dylan-esque folk track like The Bums of Easy Street, he's engaging and 100% believable. He can sing about Cowboys and Indians (although again the 7-minute slow burner is more about racism than your typical Western nare-do-wellism), dust bowl epics or broken hearts and you never question the sincerity of his characters."
- Herohill.com

"Ben Rogers is as cheeky in person as he is on tape. He possesses a unique voice and wit to match - Gordie Johnson (Big Sugar, Grady)

Ben Rogers' album smacks of unhampered creativity... Ben captures the storytelling and poignancy of country music without sacrificing lyrical depth. On the contrary, Rogers' lyrics are a unique collection of metaphors - Youthink Magazine

Too Cool! - Swerve Magazine

At the risk of sounding like a 7-Up commericial, ahhhhh Ben Rogers is refreshing. A youthful fella that has to be seen live to really grasp the scope of what he does. - Cord Magazine

Ben Rogers is a new member in the bearded songwriter family. But far beyond this pilosity detail, Ben Rogers got 2 new tracks which both are on a heavy rotation in my itunes library : the really catchy 'Criminals' & the Dylan-like 'Born to Move'. This guy is as discrete as talented ; I hope the canadian music blog squad could catch him live and grab some more information about an upcoming release... In the meantime enjoy the tunes... - Elbo.ws

This Vancouver, Canada native has the distinction of producing as good a debut album as you are likely to hear, certainly lyrically. It is rooted in the story telling of a deep dark folk genre but also occasionally sprinkles a little bluesiness  for good measure. It is an extraordinary album chock full of powerful lyrical tales that tell some incredibly evocative stories that very few can match.

Bens deep, raw vocal range has its limitations, but then so does that of many great singer songwriters, in fact such is the quality of the stories he tells that it is acceptable to compare him to many of his predecessors, such as John Prine, in their early days. He never tries to reach notes too high or too low, ensuring that there is always a pleasantly raw lilt that allows the listener to concentrate on the tale that is being told. Those vocals are perfectly suited to these stories that are unadorned with any superfluous colouration, relying instead on his portrayal of the story, and boy does it work!

Ben handles all lead vocals, plays guitar, harmonica, mandolin, banjo, autoharp, piano, organ and drum, so it’s no exaggeration to give him the label of ‘multi instrumentalist,’ added to which he also produced the album, although Jenn Bojm and Craig Mechler do help out with vocals on Kingdom Come. All songs were written by Ben with the exception of Kingdom Come, for which he wrote the lyrics but the music was co written with Johan Carlsson.

Everything about this album is minimalist and sparse except for the quality which, again lyrically, is extraordinary. Not that the music is bad; it’s just that whilst there are some excellent melodies the album is as lyric driven as any album I can ever recall hearing, to such a degree that every song has an incredibly powerful and descriptive cinematic quality. The entire recording is slow and moody, in much the same way as Springsteens ‘Nebraska,’ and includes few if any tempo changes but loses none of its power as a consequence. It is that moodiness that often sets the album apart, giving plenty of meat to the stories that in the main carry immense power and engender an avalanche of sympathy in the listener.

            The album opens with The Dealer a song that sets the scene for much that follows, driven by acoustic guitar and occasional harmonica on the story of someone who moves to the city and falls into drug dealing purely by chance. It is dark and haunting and gets more so as he sinks ever deeper into his new found ‘profession’ until the tale reaches its inevitable conclusion. It is a thematically dark story that has an inbuilt raw, threatening atmosphere that draws the listener in to a dreary life on the edge. The Cheatin’ Kind prowls the deep darkness on a powerful murder ballad of a man giving his cheating wife what he considers to be her just desserts on a song on which Bens vocal is slightly reminiscent of John Prine. That is followed by Cowboys And Indians, a tale built on a simple melody on which his vocal has an air of monotony but the story is a tremendously powerful and quite gripping ‘interracial’ love story that ends in tragedy but with an ironic twist! The use of the harmonica gives the song an even deeper and varied atmosphere. Jailbird Song includes a lovely chiming mandolin on an epic story of a prisoner who is released to go off and fight the war in Vietnam. This is a deeply refective tale that makes a point of the contradictions in spending years in jail for a minor robbery against the giving of medals for ‘killing thirty men.’ Thought provoking as well as current. Finally, 500 Mile Blues (The Devil’s Crop) is led by a nice acoustic guitar and ‘stomp’ on the epic story that twists and turns of a man who leaves his family to travel a long way to find work and eventually after many adventures gets more than he bargained on. The tale is given an extra lift by a haunting harmonica break mid way. 

If your musical preference is for realistic story songs you will be very fortunate to have found a finer example than this incredible recording. Dylan was/is an excellent writer of songs built on metaphor, whereas Ben Rogers has made a tremendous start on the road to being a master of realism. Buy the album and listen to some amazing, evocative tales. I’m told that seeing him perform these stories in a live setting is even better, so if you get the chance ……….! "  - Mike Morrison (American Roots UK)

Whilst it is always rewarding to work at getting to know a recording through repeated plays, allowing its subtleties and secrets to emerge gradually until it’s difficult to imagine not knowing it, there is even greater reward when an album clicks immediately on first listen. Here’s one.
Although born and raised in Vancouver, Ben Rogers, like his fellow countrymen of The Band, has the ability to interpret themes and events pertinent to the whole of the North American sub-continent and he's a fine storyteller, in the Steve Earle/Tom Russell vein.
The comfort of the immediacy with which Rogers’s songs demand attention is due largely to the non-complex approach taken. Accompaniment is simple, often just Rogers and one of his acoustic instruments, the occasional adornment of mouth harp, with his gruff, earthy vocal mixed well up. It sounds live and has a sparkling and intimate clarity.
Like so many troubadours favouring the solo acoustic approach, his narratives are mini-dramas, folk, blues and country-nuanced, more often than not speaking up on behalf of the downtrodden, misunderstood and forsaken, but not without humour. ‘Once A Wife, Twice A Widow’, makes the transition from biblical and Greek mythology – Lazarus and Ulysses, no less - to the plight of the struggling musician, tempted to
‘...fake my death and vanish
And maybe then I’ll sell some albums
My wife’ll do the work and I’ll come back to her
When she has made my millions’
When he does hit hard, most notably on the insistent epic 7-minutes plus ‘Cowboys and Indians’, a tale of inter-racial passion and prejudice, not a syllable or semi-quaver is wasted, and it would be an extremely dispassionate listener who doesn’t concentrate on the narrative as it unfolds.
The easy-swinging gospel of ‘Kingdom Come’ is another joy, its mini-choral harmony, church handclaps and massed whistling enhancing Rogers’s weary delivery and the performance is imbued with the atmosphere of a Southern revival meeting.
There are no weaknesses on ‘Lost Stories: Volume One’. Its contents are tailor-made for live performance. Another UK tour would be very welcome indeed.
July 27, 2014 - David James Innes (Flying Shoes)  

Ben Rogers is a singer songwriter from Vancouver who effortlessly recreates the rugged country burr of legends such as Johnny Cash and Guy Clark. In his latest offering, Lost Stories: Volume I, Rogers offers us an album of lyrically dense story songs which include, among others, songs about cowboy and Indian love trysts and hitting the lonesome road to meet the denizens who haunt it.
Lost Stories: Volume I is a gritty and lonesome sounding record which has clearly modelled itself on Springsteen’s Nebraska. Here you will find wistful harmonica and off mic crooning akin to ‘Atlantic City’. Where Jonathon Wilson has recently garnered praise for his recreation of the sound of 1960s and 1970s west coast America, so Rogers should be given equal credit for carrying the flame of country soul. Though the songs concern standard country music fair Rogers sings them with enough conviction to convey an experience in the subject matter. Who cares if Rogers isn’t actually a rambler or gunslinger, he sounds like one.
This is a highly enjoyable and accessible record that weaves tales and harmonies. No doubt Volume II will continue the story. - Americana UK (Matthew Boulter)

If Ben Rogers seems more than a little obsessed with murder, vengeance, and various other unpleasantries of life on his sophomore album, The Bloodred Yonder, that might have something to do with his upbringing. Raised in a Christian household, he’s more than passingly familiar with the Bible, which he’s read a couple of times. And if the Vancouver outlaw-country singer took anything away from the Good Book, it’s that sometimes the dark side can be more fascinating than the good one, especially when you’re a storyteller.

“Old Testament God is definitely a bit more interesting to me,” Rogers says with a raspy, nicotine-cured laugh, on the line from a Toronto tour stop. “The Book of Judges God, Ecclesiastes God, the Book of Job God. Revelation God is pretty vengeful too. For a god that’s so loving… I mean, creating all those beasts with so many eyes to come and set the world on fire—it’s a pretty interesting imagination he’s got.”

The same might be said of the man behind The Bloodred Yonder, who gallops enthusiastically from topic to topic over the course of a riotously entertaining, hourlong interview with the Straight. Asked for some of his favourite obsessions, Rogers lists off spaghetti-western composer Ennio Morricone, literary giant John Steinbeck, and the Academy Award–winning ode to violence There Will Be Blood.

“I’m definitely influenced by other writers and films,” he notes. “I think I watch There Will Be Blood about once a month.”

On The Bloodred Yonder, Rogers comes across as someone who’d love to do whisky shots with blackhearts like Nick Cave, Johnny Cash, and Cormac McCarthy, his songs marked often by biblical references. All sublime pedal steel and loping badlands guitar, “Wild Roses” has Rogers invoking Eve, Abel, and rivers of blood before singing “The Lord banished me to wander ’til I died.” Later, “River” starts with soft, Sunday-service organ and then builds into a Copperhead Road rocker flared with such lines as “Like the voice of God speaking from a burning bush” and “God saw the world he made didn’t turn out right.”

“The dark side is there,” Rogers acknowledges. “I think, at this point, I’m only interested in reading things that have a bit of the dark side in them, whether that be dealing with death or murder, and those kind of subjects, or whatever. I’m sure to some people those kinds of things are too dark. But that’s just life.”

Still, there’s an argument to be made that Rogers has lightened up since his debut album, Lost Stories: Volume One. That release was a largely acoustic affair, sounding like it was recorded for nights when the Jim Beam bottle is almost empty and the campfire’s down to nothing but glowing coals. The Bloodred Yonder is intentionally more raucous, with Rogers backed by local stalwarts (and now bandmates) Matt Kelly (pedal steel), Erik Nielsen (bass), Leon Power (drums), and John Sponarski (guitar). Helping orchestrate things in the producer’s chair was his older brother Matt, best known around town as the guitar-slinging half of blues badasses the Harpoonist and the Axe Murderer.

“Lost Stories: Volume Two could be recorded and released tomorrow,” Rogers says. “But I wanted to shift gears on this one and give people a bit of a different flavour, get people dancing and offer a few different narratives in shorter songs. And playing with the band is fun. I love playing solo, but playing with the boys is really fulfilling. It gives me the freedom to perform a bit more. They’re like brothers to me, so there’s that too.”

Those brothers would help Rogers realize the potential of some of the songs on The Bloodred Yonder.

“Some of them I wrote anywhere from a year to four or five years ago,” he says. “I feel like they were waiting for the right band to interpret them.”

The Bloodred Yonder operates as a loving tribute to the golden age of country while bringing something new to the table. Musically, Rogers and band prove nothing if not flexible, swinging easily from bourbon-hazed ballads to gun-smoke folk to paisley-dipped Americana.

On the storytelling side of things, Rogers proves a master at avoiding country’s clichés. Sure, there’s girl trouble in the saloon-boogie gold of “Wanted”, but that’s conveyed with lines like “I’m wanted by Pistol Jones and Missus Jones too/By every Tom, Dick, and Harry, but I’m not wanted by you.” In the organ-laced “Don’t Buy Me Roses”, Rogers heads to the tailor for his wedding-day suit, but everything goes south after he reveals the name of his bride: “Well, as he sized me up I spoke her name/He up and ran straight to the funeral parlour to give my measurements to the coffin-making man.”

The Bloodred Yonder isn’t, however, fixated on love and its various miseries. “Panhandler” has Rogers recounting a life led on the rails, starting with “My mother died of dust pneumonia up in Oklahoma back in 1935/My father hung himself in the pines until his bones became wind chimes.” “The More I Learn”, meanwhile, starts with “Well, my dog took a shit and I went to pick it up/There was a hole in the bag” and ends by name-checking Russian nuclear physicist Andrei Sakharov.

How clever is Rogers on The Bloodred Yonder? Well, as sure as Hank Williams had a drinking problem, no one has ever started a country song with the line “Somebody just called me a fag/For picking flowers from a chain link fence,” that coming in the shimmering ballad “Sinners”.

“I was living in Silver Lake in Los Angeles, in a warehouse with a couple of people, and it was about 1 in the morning and I was hungry,” Rogers explains. “I wanted a burrito, and I was told that Burrito King was where Gram Parsons used to like to go and eat burritos. So I thought, ‘I’ll go there and try it out.’ I was walking down the street, it was dark out, and this BMW was sort of riding up beside me. The driver had an Acapulco shirt on and just looked crazed. He rolls down his window and goes, ‘Hey faggot, come here.’ I’d stopped to pick these flowers off of a fence.”

After being followed a while, Rogers finally flipped off the driver, who became enraged and started chasing him with his car.

“I wound up running and eventually hiding in the drive-through of a KFC. It was closed, so I just hid in an alcove,” he relates. “Even though I was scared, I thought the situation was pretty funny. I didn’t have anything else to do for a while, except watch this guy, who was sort of circling around looking for me. I could hear this mariachi band somewhere off in the distance—a wedding or something like that—and it sounded almost like a heavenly host watching over me. I started thinking about Gram Parsons and Grievous Angel. And then I just wrote ‘Sinners’ right there, while I killed some time. I didn’t get a burrito, didn’t get KFC. But I did get a song out of it.”

And, one supposes, proof that, no matter how much murder, vengeance, and other unpleasantness happen to be in this world, sometimes good gets the last word.

Ben Rogers a release party for The Bloodred Yonder at the WISE Hall on Friday (September 18). - The Georgia Straight

VANCOUVER — Ben Rogers’ sophomore output The Bloodred Yonder opens with a murder ballad brewed by the Book of Genesis. Wild rose petals fall and turn to blood, trickling down through the record’s ten tunes till the last, where in “Darling Please,” the roses “curtsy and die in my hand and lie in humble slaughter.” A macabre image indeed. There are roses everywhere on this record, and blood, too. What’s going on in the head of Rogers, a Vancouver-based songwriter and overall really nice guy?

“I’m obsessed with language and formulating motifs and imagery that are cohesive through an album even though the tempo or the spirit of the songs are not always the same,” says Rogers from his home in Vancouver one Saturday morning, nursing the hangover of the night before’s album release celebration, eating chips.

The Bloodred Yonder, released by Tonic Records on August 14th, is not a concept album per se, but it was inspired in part by records like Pink Floyd’s The Dark Side of the Moon and Woody Guthrie’s Dust Bowl Ballads. Rogers wanted to make a country record meant to “evoke a different world inside the listener’s head.”

Rogers had a bona fide supergroup of americana specialists on deck to help bring his wild and greasy outlaw country vision to life, with Matt Kelly (City and Color) on pedal steel and keys, John Sponarski (Portage and Main) on lead guitar, Leon Power (Frazey Ford) on drums, Erik Nielson (Rich Hope) on bass, and Rogers’ older brother Matt (The Harpoonist & The Axe Murderer) producing. The talented collective spirit on Bloodred leans more towards the boisterous, rascally side of country; songs “Wanted” and “The More I Learn” would surely win a couple belly laughs from David Allan Coe.

And it’s a deplorable, boozy good time when the “Panhandler” rolls into town with his “three-legged dog called Tripod.” Here is a true character, born in the imagination of Rogers, relayed masterfully with Rogers’ grizzly, hard-drinking-sounding voice and the tune’s boxcar momentum. In music, Rogers believes “imagination reigns supreme.”

“Music exists in another dimension and your experience or where you’re from is nullified in that world,” says Rogers.

In the world of The Bloodred Yonder, there is plenty of rich, sinister, and sometimes hilarious scenery to escape to. You can run with the outlaws for a while.

“I love artists like Mark Bolan, who put a lot of theatre into what he did. Kurt Cobain did. Seeger did. All these people were larger than life and they put on a show,” Rogers says. “And I like to put on a show.”

Ben Rogers performs on September 17 in Victoria for Rifflandia Festival and September 18 in Vancouver at the Wise Hall. - Beatroute

Two years removed from the release of Vancouver folksmith Ben Rogers' last album, Lost Stories: Volume 1, the artist has announced a follow-up is on the way. The Bloodred Yonder will be his first LP for Tonic Records, and it hits stores August 14.

A press release notes that the album is a family affair, with Rogers having hit a recording studio with older brother Matt Rogers (the Harpoonist and the Axe Murderer) behind the boards. The country-dusted collection also finds Rogers joined by backup musicians Matt Kelly (City and Color), Erik Nielsen(Rich Hope), John Sponarski (Portage and Main) and Leon Power (Frazey Ford).

The new album is said to deliver "raucous fun and brooding ballads," pulling influence from outlaw country sources like Johnny Cash and Waylon Jennings, as well as acts like the Flying Burrito Brothers and Neil Young and Crazy Horse. Thematically, Rogers said in a statement that The Bloodred Yonder details "the transition from life to death, good to evil, paradise to perdition, and all the lost souls you meet along the way."

He added, "It begins in the fabled Garden of Eden and descends into a distant netherworld filled with drinking, debauchery, dancing, manmade disasters, godmade disasters, sin, and murder."

Down below, you'll find a stream of "Wild Roses," a rough-and-tumblin' tale of love and betrayal. You'll also find a teaser trailer for the LP and info on a few Western Canadian concert dates.

On top of his solo work, Rogers has helped pen material with the Harpoonist and the Axe Murderer, as well as bluesy BC unit No Sinner.

The Bloodred Yonder:

1. Wild Roses
2. Wanted
3. Panhandler
4. Goodbye Rosa Lee
5. Sinners
6. River
7. Don't Buy Me Roses
8. The More I Learn
9. Living Without You
10. Darling Please

Tour dates:

07/18 Fort McLeod, AB - South Country Fair
07/24 Vancouver, BC - ShoreFEST
09/10 Toronto, ON - The Horseshoe *

* with the Harpoonist and the Axe Murderer - Exclaim