Listen To The Man

A couple of weeks before America went to the polls to either elect a new president or re-elect the incumbent Barack Obama, Kentucky-born singer, songwriter and cellist Ben Sollee was getting very nervous. What if the People opted to vote for Mitt Romney? Or worse, what if the People just couldn't be bothered to vote at all, distracted perhaps by the havoc wrought by Hurricane Sandy, and Romney snuck over the line? So he took his cello and a cameraman into the Lincoln Memorial in Washington DC and started singing his A Few Honest Words, just to attract a little attention for his simple message: “Just vote”. Two minutes into his performance, a burly security guard told him he couldn't do this, so he politely picked up his cello and stool and left, setting up a few hundred yards in front of the building to complete his mission.

“Oh my God, it was really terrifying,” Sollee, on the line from San Francisco, admits, referring to the election rather than his little piece of political activism. “I was playing a show in Arizona when the election was going on and all the votes were coming in and when I went on stage it was about half and half, and I was just terrified I was gonna come off stage to what was going to become a very different situation in our country, and so I'm excited Obama turned out to be our president.”

As for his Lincoln Memorial performance, “it was kind of an affirming thing to do, to try to… Oh gosh, be heard, so to speak. I know it's not legal to perform in our national monuments but I was running into so many people that felt like their voice didn't matter, I almost did it to say, 'Hey, if I can get kicked out, then that means my voice matters in some way.'”

He might just be another singer-songwriter, albeit one who has come to his chosen instrument, in a truly unique and innovative way, playing it like a guitar or banjo, but Sollee is also as passionately committed to giving voice to those he sees in society as perhaps having their voices suppressed, in the tradition of America's folk/country protest singers. His latest addition to that part of his catalogue is Get Off Your Knees, from his latest album, Half-Made Man.

“For me, I started this, kind of making… When I say this whole thing I mean career making bigger gestures about social statements and everything, and as I've matured and made more music I've learned that it's really about a human-to-human interaction, and I've become much more humanistic. So this record is that, in a way.”

With regards to the social issues about which he's been most vocal, the issue the removal of mountains for coal mining in his native Kentucky has long been at the top of the agenda, but he's also an activist for Oxfam America and has toured his home state several times by environmentally-friendly bicycle. As diverse a collection as ever, Half-Made Man, his fourth album, sees Sollee pulling together a more cohesive body of work than he has on earlier albums.

“Yeah,” he agrees. “In that way it's a collection of portraits of the various pieces and parts of this twenty-eight year old fella. I think one of the reasons it has a cohesive feel is that we have a live band in the studio [including My Morning Jacket's Carl Broemel] this time, rather than having a bunch of parts that I overdubbed and orchestrated, and that lent itself to a little more of an immediate feel rather than the kind of curated, clean recordings that I did in the past.”

Ben Sollee will be playing the following dates:

Friday 4 January - Bellingen Memorial Hall, Bellingen NSW
Tuesday 8 January - Notes Live, Sydney NSW
Wednesday 9 January - Notes Live, Sydney NSW
Thursday 10 January - Northcote Social Club, Northcote VIC