'If You Want To Write Songs The Only Way To Do It Is Keep Living'

US singer-songwriter Benjamin Booker turned a lot of heads when his eponymous debut album arrived back in 2014, its primal mixture of blues, punk and soul sounding raw and vital and announcing the arrival of a fierce new talent.

Fast-forward a few years and Booker - emboldened by a few years' experience on the road and honing his skill set - released his second gambit Witness in mid-2017, the new collection far more polished and adding new elements such as soul and gospel into the mix (the title track even including the legendary Mavis Staples on backing vocals).

But while it's a slightly more refined batch of songs, it still defiantly and recognisably emanates from the same artist, Booker explaining that his unique sound was originally the result of a happy musical accident when he was living in Florida studying journalism at college.

"When I was first making stuff I was living in a small college town in Gainesville, Florida and there were a bunch of folk-punk bands coming out of there at the time, just bands mixing roots music and punk. And then I was also into Otis Redding and stuff, and I think it was just a clear line of, 'What if you did those soul melodies and things placed over this music that you're listening to now?'" he laughs. "That was basically what happened and it worked. I think one day I literally thought about that and the songs came not long after that and it worked, it was really crazy.

"I think the sound was just that 'right place at the right time' kinda thing, where you're just like, 'This is the music that people are making here and I also like that, why don't we put these two things together?'"

The self-titled album garnered Booker a lot of critical acclaim and found him sharing stages with names such Jack White and Courtney Barnett and rocking out on late-night talk shows, but those experiences didn't make the task any easier when it came time to knuckle down and work on album number two.

"I think it's just always hard to write albums, dude," he chuckles. "I don't want to be one of those guys who's complaining, because it's the easiest job in the world, but I would say that for, like, 18 months it's the easiest job in the world and then you have to spend the next few months writing an album and it's just, like, the hardest thing.

"Making stuff is hard, and I think what I've learned from listening to other people and just from doing it more is that you really can't force it. You really have to sit back and wait for things to come to you, because when you really try to sit down and just crank out a song it always sucks - at least for me it always sucks.

"So, yeah, I was having a rough time, but I think that that's what happened - I ended up just waiting and not thinking about it and taking a vacation, and then I ended up doing the whole album on that vacation. I think that's the way I'm going to approach it from now, definitely just relax and wait for it to come."

The vacation in question found Booker decamping to Mexico City to escape the tumultuous times unravelling in his homeland, and ensconcing himself in a place where he didn't speak the language - helped in part by some choice literary guidance - eventually opened the creative floodgates.

"I went down without plans for making a record, I'd just brought my guitar just in case, and I was reading a book and I think that was what opened things," he reflects. "I was reading a book called White Noise [by Don DeLillo] and there was a quote that said, 'What we are reluctant to touch often seems the very fabric of our salvation,' and I was, like, 'Oh damn, that's what I should be making this record about: the facts that I don't want to talk about.'

"Just the things in your life that are really difficult to deal with - I think that if you want to make an album that's worth anything, that's truthful or just, like, has any sort of artistic merit, it's important for me to go deeper. So I took out some paper and wrote down a bullet-pointed list of things I wanted to address in my own life, and that kind of became the outline for the album, just the basis of it, and it all came together after that."

Despite being an avid reader of literature and his output already housing some powerful lyrics - especially the socio-political treatises scattered throughout Witness - Booker explains that the words don't always come easily for him during the creative process. "It's the hardest part," he smiles. "I think that that's the hardest part, because my greatest fear is just singing things in public that I don't care about, or even just recording them. I think that's the hardest part. To be a good performer in front of people I think you really have to believe what you're saying, so I think that's really important to me.

"And it's hard. If someone asked you to come up with an album's worth of things, like, 'What's on your mind right now?', you're going to be, like, 'I don't know!' I think your job is just to take the things in your life and see it all in certain contexts that are maybe a little bit frightful and that people can relate to, and that's crazy! It's a crazy thing to think about, so you don't really think about that, but it slowly just comes together over time."

Fortunately for Booker the songs from Witness still resonate with him deeply and have proved enjoyable to play on stage, even if initially difficult to replicate because of the relative studio embellishments. "Yeah, they have been fun to play," he admits. "It was really, really difficult to do at the beginning when we first started heading out on the road, because the first album that we did was basically a live record - we just went in and pressed play and just played the song, some of it was first takes in the studio - but this one was properly recorded and we layered instruments in the studio and those kinds of things, so I think recreating it live was initially difficult.

"But by the end of last year when we were touring in Europe and stuff, and then the fall headlining tour [of the States], I felt really good about it: I think that we got into a good place. There are some songs which sound different live than on the album, which I think is fun for people in the audience and fun for us, but I feel really good about the live show at the moment."

And despite having had a lot of downtime recently, Booker still hasn't really thought too much about album number three, preferring to wait for that often-elusive inspiration to come find him.

"I'm not busy at all, I'm the opposite of busy!" he exclaims. "I have definitely been thinking about it, but, as we were talking about earlier, I can think about it, but I know I can't focus on it too much. You have to live your life. If you want to write songs the only way to do it is to just keep living; you have to have things to write about. So I'm just messing around with sounds, and I think you build that database of things that you like - just riffs and stuff like that - and I'm just doing things like that now and waiting for that inspiration."

It can be hard being a musician while actually accruing life experience sometimes, with the rigours of touring and recording obligations often obtruding into one's private realms.

Booker considers, "That's true and that's why people make so many crappy follow-up albums, because that's what happens to people: you stop living. You stop living and you have to put out albums too fast, and there hasn't been enough time in between for you to grow as a person so the music is the same and you have nothing different to offer. I hate that idea of just putting out the same record again, so I'm just trying to stay patient."