Ben Godwin

“Come away with me and we’ll have ourselves a life!” Imagine Kurt Weill moving to New Orleans and working for 20 years in a nightclub before moving out to LA where a film producer asks him to write a musical about New York that gets rejected by the film industry but opens to wild crowds on Broadway. If you can imagine that, then you have a good picture of Ben's music. “Trade the stubborn farmland for a million neon lights!” Picture 100 dancers behind the singer onstage. “We’ll look away while the violence carries on.” The pianist is keeping the bass player and drummer busy pumping rhythm to a holy beat. “We’ll make a new religion out of rusty cars.” The break has a six ring circus of dancers doing different moves – a taste for the inner eyes of my mind. As you can expect, I’ll have to listen 100 times to catch all the action. And I will. Willingly.

A shout-out for the title tune, Skin And Bone, complete with oompa cabaret flavors: “Poverty’s a crime in the poorhouse and the punishment is life. The lucky ones work in the slaughterhouse and the rest go under the knife. Hunger is a crime in the madhouse where the gunners are running with that, and liberty runs on consumption – is anything wrong with that?” A dance filled night of musical theatre coming to a stage near you soon. In the meantime, check out this cool record. - Eartaste.com

The songs Ben Godwin writes seem to be as much a part of his life as they are a product of it, and this is the difference between the bundled Shiny/Atom releases and the forthcoming Skin and Bone. All are apt examples of quality songwriting and musicianship, but Skin and Bone, as the title denotes, feels more open and settled in a way that's honest. It sounds less polished and more like one of those artists finding his/her voice clichés - soaked in the dirt, gasoline, and restaurant grease on the sidewalks and subway platforms of his new home. The album opens with the glorious “Drinking Gasoline” and continues with “New World City,” which moves with the same urgency and impending doom he sees in the City each day. The album continues with rich, buttery tones, captured at Seaside on highlights like “Skin and Bone”, “Paper Thin Walls”, and “Outsize Shoes.” The album, over all, has a dramatic, upbeat musical feel that is well versed in American post-war blues/early rock and roll, jazz-influenced harmonies, pop melodies with an eye for the theatrical. His voice comes across strong, soulful, and present in each and every verse. - urbanfolk

Rockin’ roll and rollin’ rocks make for an interesting listen that’s so successful it sounds at once just barely removed from a dirty saloon and a fine upscale restaurant ballroom. It’s not often that one singer/songwriter can achieve such a myriad of influential sounds but Ben Godwin, a London musical native did just that. His sound is raw and lyrical, something that we all could learn a little something from. Golden! - Smother.net

Gritty and glittering street scenes come alive on the rollicking debut from this London native turned New Yorker. Combining jazzy cabaret swagger with soulful sincerity, Skin And Bone belongs in both dueling piano bars and topdown car stereos, as Ben Godwin’s gruff, Tom Waits-like growl saunters toward perfection. It seems New York City has done Godwin some good. - Magnet (#76)

A delightfully quirky, sprightly and tuneful idiosyncratic sonic romp, this album scores extra points for both striking originality and sheer eccentricity. Ben Godwin's big, booming, raspy, yet robust voice belt out the offbeat lyrics with tremendous rip-snorting theatrical hambone flair. The arrangements are perfectly catchy, lively and harmonic, offering plenty of merry bounce and infectious energy to spare. Whether it's the rousing bombast of the opening number "Drinking Gasoline" and the spirited "Outsize Shoes," the touching thoughtfulness of the lovely "Constantly Reminded," or the sober philosophizing of the nifty closing item "Skin and Bone," this album remains a total flaky treat from start to finish. - Joe Wawrzyniak

"Drinking Gasoline" may have very well been written as the 1st act closer to some fantastic Broadway musical taking place in dank, rainy back alleys and sleazy bars. Everyone's smoking and scantily-clad women are dancing on the bar like they've chosen this profession because it's fun. Oh, "New World City" gives off the same sort of animation, but this time "la la la la la la la la"'s make a grand and appreciated entrance. Godwin's use of a stomping piano, sandpaper vocals, and surprising word usage (bonus points for incorporating the phrase "post-millennium bric-a-brac") renders Skin and Bones not only repeat-worthy, but distinctive. Then we slow down. Enter the tear-jerking piano heavy love ballad, "Constantly Reminded", highlighted by references to hands and New York City (like any decent love song), and every fish-netted female wipes her eyes and thinks that maybe things like love and happiness and not dancing on a bar until 4 a.m. really do exist.

But enough with the musical theater connections (even though it's under Skin and Bone's surface for the duration of the album); Godwin moves his rowdy vocals over nine blues-based tracks relating, love, New York City, and rats like no one's ever thought about any of these things before.

The album ender and title track, "Skin and Bone's" couldn't be a better concluder with it's background chorus (of singing barmaids) and piano induced raunchiness; I can't really think of a reason to sit still or not play the cd over again from the beginning. - Antimusic.com

Speaking of Tom Waits, there's a little of him in Ben Godwin, a Londoner transplanted to New York. With a gritty voice that's half Joe Cocker and half Ian Anderson, Godwin belts out a set of theatrical, jazz-inflected tunes inspired by New York City life. By turns soulful ("Constantly Reminded"), Bacharachian ("Paper Thin Walls"), gentle ("Castaway") and Brelian ("Outsize Shoes"), Godwin's songs are as old-fashioned as the intelligibility of the lyrics he pipes out with his thick baritone. "Poverty's a crime in the poorhouse / And the punishment is life / The lucky ones work in the slaughterhouse / And the rest go under the knife," he bellows in the title track, where you should also listen for Julie LaMendola's eerie saw-playing.

"We'll sweat our hearts out / Fill a rich man's cup in the New World City / We'll break our backs building monuments to the sky / Catch our fingers in the teeth of the machinery," he cries like Bertholdt Brecht and Kurt Weill in "New World City," but we'll also "make a new religion out of rusted cars / Our televisions, and our hollow stars." "So very precious," cries the Everyman of Godwin's tales, "but we're only worth a song in the New World City." But the value of a song, as Godwin certainly knows, is boundless.

Echoing Jacques Brel's "The Bulls," "New World City" ends with a litany of places, cities all over the world where people struggle. But unlike the Brel song, which leaves us with its grim battlefield images, Godwin's "La la la" chorus returns for a final affirmation of life amidst the dirt and grime.

This music is serious, fun, and definitely different.

- Blogcritics.com - Jon Sobel