It's Chemistry

Here last Easter for the 2013 Bluesfest, all huge red beard and thick horn-rimmed glasses, Ben Caplan's feet have barely touch the ground since. The Halifax, Nova Scotia resident has toured Europe a couple of times over the northern summer as well as gigging around western Canada with a couple of side trips to the odd festival. But he did manage to take some time out at home to work on some new material. After all, it's nearly three years since he released his second album, In The Time Of The Great Remembering, which kicked up his career from clubs to national and international festivals.

“I've been working on some different musical ideas,” he explains, “and really trying to just push my own boundaries and try to learn some new things about breaking songs apart and putting them back together again.”

The last time The Music spoke to Caplan, he admitted the most difficult thing about the songwriting process for him was figuring out what he actually wanted to say. “That part is still the hardest part. You sort of have to spend, for me anyway, the most important part of the process is taking the time every day to write and think about songs and try to write some terrible ones, and then the fun part, the easy part, when that is done, is taking them apart and fucking around with them. So I've just been engaging in a lot of that kind of work and having a great time of it.

“We went into the studio with most of the cast of characters I'm planning on making the next record with maybe a little less than a month ago [this was mid-November], just as a little pre-production test, and that went extremely well. It's mostly just been about getting everybody's schedules in sync that I want to work with, so it'll probably be in early to mid-April that I wind up back in the studio in an official capacity, and then the record will proceed from there. It's certainly gonna have more piano on it than the last record.”

That'll once again be with his band, The Casual Smokers, who will this time be travelling to Australia with him. Not that it's a conventional band by any means, what with classical violin, sax, flute, cello and upright bass in the mix.

“It still morphs and changes a little from tour to tour and recording session to recording session. To me it's just about finding the most exciting musical personalities. The group that I most commonly work with and will be recording with are people that I've met over years of playing and hearing about who the hot guy or gal to check out is that could play this stuff. So I've just been collaborating with lots of different people till we find the right personality matches and the right musical chemistry.”