Standing In A River, Catching A Fish:
Ben Weaver With Donna Simpson
by Dean Bonzani
7-12-04
If Lucinda Williams was younger, beefier, hairier, and sang with a deeper version of her trademark ragged-beautiful voice, she might just be Ben Weaver.
Not that Minnesota’s itinerate folk philosopher counts Ms. Williams as much of an influence since her release of any music after “Car Wheels On A Gravel Road.” But listen awhile to Weaver’s mournful baritone, with its rutted out phrasing and callused strength, and you might be reminded of Williams’ gulping vowels and chin-on-your-shoulder delivery.
Some of the faded shades of Weaver’s tales could have been dabbed with colors borrowed from Lucinda’s palette: wistful yearnings, dour pronouncements, and bitter conclusions after the screen door has slammed shut on a shouted goodbye. But, Ben Weaver’s take on things is strictly his own, and his gift of language is that he can take words that have been made commonplace, and give them a new and strange life in his songs. In his latest release, “Stories Under Nails,” on his own Fugawee Bird Records, in the song “Ragged Words,” he reveals himself:
This lost dog heart
These reasons why
This entangled sleep
These shows I play
This rock and roll vein
This blue collar mouth
This angel’s idea
This road map home
These chain link prayers
This father’s word
This guitar money
This red light cigarette
Weaver’s candor and sleeve-worn heart come across without polish or adornment in his rumbling voice, as he delivers junkyard soliloquies and saw-toothed ruminations on rusted out relationships:
Left behind in a promise that you wrote
With a wet finger in the dust on my door
Just as a troubled mind yearns to be soothed
My love for you is just like a wound
Accompanying himself with a spare-picked guitar or banjo, Weaver’s gothic tales sound as if they were written in blood on the walls of a garret by a somber watchman— a grim, but well-put report on impending doom, crafted into poetry for an extra note of soft-spoken irony. His stories are populated by dogs and trucks and dripping trees and shadows where the dark shapes of regret could leap out at any moment. If a kindly, but slightly bitter old farmer had found himself suddenly and mortally impaled by a seemingly innocent piece of farm equipment, and stood in the hot sun of a Kansas afternoon with his vital fluids draining into his worn out boots— unable to free himself— as the horizon began to shimmer and swim in his eyes, he might sing songs like this as the breath was dying on his cracked lips.
Weaver got his start, of course, in punk bands as a teenager. After growing up in the bayous of Oregon, playing electric guitar and learning to paint, he set out for college back east to study painting. College didn’t agree with him, but it was there that he discovered the music of Townes Van Zandt.
“That just really struck a huge chord in me,” Weaver says. “Ever since I was little, my biggest dream has been to play music- to show up in a town I don't know, and be the guy who gets up on the stage to play. I never thought that I had what it took. I never believed. The first songs I wrote when I was 18, I thought, ‘Oh, these are horrible. I would love to do this, but I don't think I've got it in me.’ Something happened- I don't know what it is- my confidence shifted, and I started feeling that I didn't want to do anything but this. I've always been half-good at everything, and I'm not saying that I'm the best at music, but for me, it's been the one thing that I've been able to really make a life out of, and see my way through the hard times and not quit. It's the one thing that, when it gets really hard, I want to keep going. I never totally lose my love.”
Weaver holds high standards for writing, looking to veterans like Greg Brown for inspiration, and placing greater emphasis on the lyrical side of his songs.
Touring in support of “Songs Under Skin,” he’ll be accompanied by Amsterdam guitarist Mark “The Cleaner” Zilma, and at times by his traveling companion, the globally beloved, self-made folk sensation Donna Simpson, who is performing solo for the first time in a career that has, before now, solely revolved around the Australian Recording Industry Award-winning trio The Waifs.
The fickle winds of fate have blown these three together.
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Ben Weaver w/The Cleaner and The Waifs’ Donna Simpson at The Orpheum, Sun. July 18th. Tickets are a well-spent $5.
see: www.benweaver.net or www.commotionpr.com/benweaver.html (for lyrics and mp3’s)
©2004 by Dean Bonzani, All Rights Reserved