 by Keith Pille
Some albums fall together almost immediately. Uncle Tupelo, for instance, recorded their best (and least-creatively named) album in the space of March 16-20, 1992.
Others take a bit longer. Local scene veteran Ben Glaros figures it was almost a decade between the inception and the completion of his solo album. “I started taking the solo project thing seriously several years ago,” he says. “Like eight years ago. It’s taken me quite a while to get to where I was actually ready to put out an official release. It’s been a slow process.”
Download an mp3 of Ben Glaros’ song “Don’t Get High.”
That process was set in motion when Glaros realized that music, if approached
the wrong way, was as capable of feeling like drudgery as anything else. “It
was 1997, and I was doing a couple of things: working my day job and playing
with this jazz group called The Neighborhood Trio. It was educational—I
really enjoyed playing jazz—and I thought it was going to be my ticket
out of the day job. But it wasn’t really getting me there, and I was finding
myself with no time to do what I really wanted to do with music.”
 “It
was getting kind of depressing,” he continues, “finding myself having
to get all dressed up for gigs. So when I quit, I took a month off and took
a little trip down to New Mexico, where my mom was living, and I just kind of
said ‘OK. I’m going to clear my head and figure out what I really
want to do.’ And I already knew that I had a few songs sitting around
and wanted to focus more on that. That was really the turning point.”
He quickly found that, with such a personal cast to the project, doing it at
home and by himself was the only way to go. “It was good to be able to
just do it when I was in the mood for it,” he says, “to work on
it when it felt right and take my time doing it. I’d like to get into
a studio with a band some time soon, but with this, it had to be a home recording.”
The resulting album, Solo, is a sort of real-world case study in the
tortoise winning the race. In taking his time, Glaros was able to pull together
a collection of introspective, sparse songs and infuse them with feeling. Solo
is slow, for the most part, but never dull. And despite the minimal, recorded-in-a-living-room
arrangement (most songs feature just vocals, acoustic guitar, and either electric
guitar or a cello), the overall sound is surprisingly lush. iTunes’ music
database lists the disc as folk, and I suppose I can see that. But you could
be just as justified in calling it acoustic rock. The music has far more atmosphere
and texture than your standard one-man-with-an-acoustic-guitar folk album.
 I
submit that this sparse-but-lush result is an outgrowth of the way the songs
were written; Glaros says that it was important to him that every song on the
record be able to stand on its own without a lot of instrumentation. “I
haven’t really thought that much about arrangements. I tend to want to
write a song... Well, with any song I write, at least at this point, I always
have it in the back of my mind that I want it to function with just a guitar
and vocals. That’s not the definition of good music, but to me that’s
the definition of a good song, one that different people could do in different
contexts. I want to write stuff that doesn’t need much added to it.”
With this self-sufficiency built into the music from the get-go, it makes sense
that it sounds fully fleshed-out with minimal ornamentation.
A word about Glaros’ voice: going purely by vocal characteristics, he
sounds remarkably like the Flaming Lips’ Wayne Coyne, down to the way
he’ll hold and stretch out a vowel. And while his voice works quite well
with the music, the Coyne resemblance is a little disconcerting at first because
the subject matter is so different. Instead of singing about fighting robots
or Superman, Glaros has a ground-level, everyman observational post grounded
firmly in the reality of everyday life. The closest thing Solo has to a Wayne
Coyne lyric comes towards the end of the second song, “Don’t Get
High,” when Glaros mentions offhand that he tried smoking oregano as an
experimental-minded teen.
Not that “Don’t Get High” is a paean to better living through
chemistry. Glaros explains that the song, one of the oldest on the disc, was
written in 1997 during the aforementioned period of disillusionment. “‘Don’t
Get High’ was kind of a turning point song for me. That song kind of came
about when I was in that situation of playing these really routine, boring gigs;
you know, not getting a high from doing it any more, not enjoying it any more.”
Ben Glaros made it clear several times that he approached Solo as a labor
of love; and even if he hadn’t said anything, any project that goes eight
years in the making is clearly something that the artist cares about a lot.
But, having finished it and started playing shows to support it, Glaros doesn’t
want to sit back and rest on his laurels. he wants to record more material;
he talked about possibly doing more intense studio recording with a full band.
He wants to push things.
“I definitely want to get it out there,” he says, “as far
as I can.”
Ben Glaros performs the CD release show for Solo on Fri. Mar.
25 at the Acadia Cafe and Theater with Jelloslave. 8 p.m. All Ages. $5. 1931
Nicollet Ave. S., Mpls. 612-874-8702.
Find out more about Ben Glaros on his official website at
BenGlaros.com.
Head on over to our Mp3s page and download Ben Glaros’ song “Don’t Get High.”
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