At the risk of sounding like a 7-Up commericial, ahhhhh Ben Rogers is refreshing. A youthful fella that has to be seen live to really grasp the scope of what he does, he's quirky, clever, quick-witted, talented, and entertaining. That's a range that musicians seem to rarely be able to span so effortlessly - or at least make it seem effortless. No one's doubting the hard work Rogers puts into his music, but you can't help but just get the feeling that he was born into this role rather than forcing himself into it to win some sort of popularity contest or just because he was bored or something.

Ben Rogers met me at a long-and-narrow eatery in downtown Vancouver for an evening-time chat. While there were no eats among us, we sat ourselves on display like storefront mannequins in the window, settled into our used-office-furniture seats and had a couple beverages to whet our collective whistle. Rogers' album, The Dawn Of A New Error, had only been out a matter of weeks when he sat down with me. The release was such a long-anticipated event that perhaps in the excitement of planning a CD release (at the swanky Sonar night club), he neglected to realize that he scheduled the party right in the middle of Canadian Music Week. CMW is one of the larger events in Canadian music, and one that sees just about every label rep and media member (including me!) in existence descending on Toronto to see what's new. Consequently, Rogers was left with, still a fairly healthy attendance figure (about 150 spectators), but one that was unfortunately lacking in people who could quickly advance his career.

It was still a truly long time from the album's completion to its release. "We finished it around September and then released it in March. Finished everything, packaging and in our hands... Just, a bunch of things happened... Like we had booked a CD release party in December but it was just a bit too quick for me, to rehearse and get everything really tight. And then we booked a release party for the 4th of March and invited all these people to come out who were really interested in seeing us and then it turned out it was Canadian Music Week so we kinda screwed ourselves over there... There was someone from [S.L. Feldman] that came out."

At the moment, 'Ben Rogers' is really Ben and his brother Matt, taking care of all sides. Getting a 'staff' isn't of utmost importance right now since Matt is apparently pretty decent at the business side of things, despite enjoying playing shows they didn't actually have to set up themselves, thereby enabling them more time to concetrate solidly on the music and performance. "We do everything in tandem so all the decisions are mutual. Like he produced the album and arranged it. We’re the same entity. I think he’s better at that than I am. I’m not... I read the Bible a lot. And it’s sort of like Moses and Aaron. I guess God chose Moses to go forth and set the people free but he wasn’t a very good public speaker, didn’t have much of a voice, so Aaron came along to do the speaking for him. And so in some ways we both switch the roles. Like Moses and Aaron. Splitting the Red Sea that gets between us and where we need to go. I love working with him, we get along really well."

The process of recording itself saw the musician and his collaborators (mostly his brother) travelling around North America to complete bits and pieces of the disc. Notably, he recruited Gordie Johnson, the recently-Texas-dwelling former frontman of Canadian blues-rock gods Big Sugar to sit at the helm on some songs. "Genre-wise it’s sort of all over the place and so, we were looking for people to mix the album who could give it an extra side. People who would bring out something different because at that time before we went into mixing, it was really scattered sounding, so we wanted to cut back on it and get certain ideas out and whatnot. All the rockier stuff we gave to Gordie Johnson… he wanted to do the whole album but we didn’t have enough money for that unfortunately. But he did a really good job… cuz we’re not really technically rock-trained, my brother and me, and [Matt] did all the production, and so Gordie really brought out like the gritty stuff in songs that wasn’t there even while we were recording it. He just sort of like… “oh okay, this song’s an actual rock song now.” On the suggestion of a Toronto studio, Rogers decided to head down to Texas to have Johnson do up the chosen tunes, rather than pay for Johnson's return to Canada to do those duties. So in the inspirational surroundings of Willie Nelson's Pedernales Studio, the Rogers brothers and Johnson hung out, explored a massive range of mind-boggling musical talent out of Johnson that neither of them anticipated, and dodged some desert wildlife in the process that really just wanted a nice place to settle down for the night.

"I did find a scorpion in my bed! Haha. The funniest part about it is… this is like 3 am. And we’d just got back from mixing. So I’m super-tired. I was really sick too, I actually found out I had mono when I got back. Don’t tell Gordie cuz I feel so bad being around his kids, his little kids. But yeah, so this was funny. I just really wanted to go to bed and so I’m lying down in the bed and I look down and right at my feet is this scorpion. And I just like… ‘ah there’s a scorpion.’ of course [Matt and I] are sleeping in the same bed right. So… we’re such wimps, we’re like... 'We gotta find a way to get rid of this thing.' Like I know that you can’t crush them or anything, and I don’t want to pick it up with anything so we went into his kitchen, into Gordie’s kitchen, grabbed a spatula [how appropriate...], wrapped paper towel around it, drenched it with water and tried to drown the thing. We seriously sat there for like 20 minutes, like 'okay… you think it’s dead yet? Hang on let’s see…' So we lift it up and we try to scoop it up, but it twitches so we’re like, 'oh quick kill it kill it!' It was pretty funny. It eventually died and we flushed it down the toilet."

Exciting times. But has anyone else noticed how much of a hotbed Texas seems to be for musical genius? It seems like anytime the lone-star state is mentioned, it's because of this new band or that new festival or the other great recording... I wonder if Rogers finds it more important as a nucleus of music than, say, New York or LA. "It's amazing. I’ve never been to New York. I’ve been to LA but not for musical purposes. Um it’s like amazing. I’m sure it beats New York. Well Austin’s the music capital of the world. I think. It’s like all bands all the time. Just all the time music, like not necessarily big names but there’s just music all the time. And [the South By Southwest festival] is just sort of an amplification of that." Matt Rogers was actually taking part in SXSW. While Ben Rogers was there, he only managed to take in a couple shows unfortunately, but the atmosphere was, as he says, really amazing. "Like if we could bring that here… here there’s so many creative people [in Vancouver] but no real outlet for it. Everything’s really far apart. You know from North Van… Vancouver… Richmond… Burnaby, all that."

Growing up in North Vancouver, most of the support network for Rogers' music stemmed from his friends and family. "They'd come out to all the shows and stuff like that. But it would be nice to get some people that are like… I mean sometimes you get people who are like... A whole room full of fresh faces that you’ve never seen before. Which is really nice. But you end up having to push your regulars to come out, or else it suffers. It’s sad but... I don’t know what it is. And I guess going to Emily Carr [Institute of Art and Design] was pretty encouraging just because youre surrounded by creative energy all day and so that helps a lot." Rogers took a foundation year in the artsy-fartsy Emily Carr school before dropping out after becoming disillusioned with the 'diluted artistry' of it all. "I don’t really regret it but, I’m not going back haha."

The friends he made at art school came in handy recently when they symbiotically scoped one another out for a video project. Taking Rogers' song "A Night On The Ghost Town," the two sides put their heads together to come up with a concept they were both happy with. "It’s sort of like a year-end project that a couple students from Emily Carr were doing. I was like, well let’s make a video. So it’s a good opportunity. It’s a good tool to have for promoting your music. It seems you can’t really get anywhere without a visual accompaniment of some kind. But it was really fun. We put 100% into it and … it’s weird though because I’m usually writing stories with my songs so it’s almost like you're renovating your story without compromising the story itself. So you have different ideas floating around… it was sort of hard for me at first."

Let's talk concepts. "One of them was… well the song’s "A Night On The Ghost Town" so it’s a love story in sort of a dark place. These two people connecting and having a night on the ghost town. Basically their world is kind of dead and they're finding the beauty in it. And [the filmmakers] wanted sort of a sexual sort of scene, leaning towards each other and all these sort of abstract images to indicate that they had sex... But you know, if people wanna think that, they can think that but I didn’t like having anything too specific in the video. I just wanted to be sort of presenting images and people can sort of elaborate on them with the help of the words - whatever they feel like."

In the end, a compromise was made. "We’re doing our own separate edits. So they can have their version and I can have mine. So that’s nice, doing it with friends and people you trust."

Getting wildly off-track, we start to talk about real ghost towns and hauntings. Fascinating. "There’s one on the island that I spend my summers on. I maroon myself. There’s a couple places actually. You know, really haunting, like this one place where this guy started building this house for his wife and she died before they finished it so there’s like this half erected building and it’s just like… yeah. It reminds you of mortality. I remember we were wanting to go shoot in a place like Princeton or Hedley or something like that where there’s a real authentic ghost town. And I did lots of research and found really interesting stuff like there’s an actual… I don’t know the term for it but there’s an actual boot camp where they sent all these Japanese people during the time of the Second World War, from Vancouver, and they shipped them over there. And it’s still there. There’s another town where I think they had just started building this place and… I think this was around the time of the First World War… and all these men got sent off to war. And none of them came back and so the whole place just got evacuated. And I know that there’s an actual curse on a burial ground somewhere on the island where I maroon myself for the summer."

Now we're just getting out of hand, but check out this creepy little tale... "I had this one nightmare actually - this is the time when I was at Emily Carr and I wasn’t sleeping very much and really stressed out and lots of work, lots of work and my dog had just died and she was my best friend. Like I didn’t have many human friends so she was my best friend. So she had just recently passed away and I had this dream. But I was awake but like… I mighta been half asleep or something. I don’t know. It was really bizarre but I looked up and I could see the devil on… hanging from my light in the middle of my room. And he was shaking a little trident. Actually it was only the shadow of the devil. So this big trident was swooping down towards me and was like 'go away go away oh go away…' and I just hid under my covers just waiting for sleep, freaked out of my mind. And then I thought, okay I’m gonna go back to sleep now and just sleep on it, sort of thing and I woke up to this loud noise in the morning. I had all these mood shells on my windowsill. One of them had fallen off, so I looked over and my sister was there. And I said ‘what are you doing there?' and she just looked at me and I just remember staring at her right in the eyes and then looking down and she was wearing a great big tshirt and she had no legs. And then I just… my heart exploded and she just vanished. I was freaking out, I took like a week off school."

Stressful indeed! Back to music. In a world of copycat, instafame radiorock, where does such an artistic project fall into the big picture? Rogers makes an astonished face when I ask him where he feels he fits into the modern musical landscape. He seems unsure how to answer at first, as though perhaps the thought just simply never crossed his mind before. "I think if those people are gonna get into it it has to be for that reason that, you know, from song to song things are pretty different. But I can understand why it would be deceiving to a listener who listens to, say, “One In A Million” and loves it, and then they hear “Jesus And A Jackknife” and go, well, what’s this? This is not what I wanted! But I think that people usually... I don’t know, it’s so weird, how people would want to listen to something that’s the same all the through an album. I know a lot of people … like I listen to that Coldplay album, I don’t know which one it was, but it sounds like somebody just kinda like pressed stop and record from track to track. I just don’t get that. Maybe I will someday. Who knows. But not with this."

Radio isn't a big goal for him either. "Just as long as it’s in a place where it can be heard by everyone. I’d like to think that it’s accessible in some ways. It doesn’t have to be accessible to everyone. I don’t think I would want it to be. So it’s constant trial and error trying to figure out what avenues to go down cuz it’s sort of… to get it there where people can hear it. People want to do their own thing in their own way you know." He agrees that radio isn't even really valid unless you're played ten or more times a day, which these days can only be accomplished if you have a lot of money to pay off radio stations, or you're just really lucky (and/or following the trend).

As mentioned, a huge part of the Ben Rogers experience is his quirky demeanour. Live, he uses a pile of wacky props to accent his tunes. "I like to think of myself as not being a selfish performer. And so there’s not really a chance where you can do total wardrobe changes to adapt to the music, and different characters and everything for each song. And so you can usually achieve that through props. So I brought that in. It sort of helped the idea of the music, or helps the song to get across. And it’s fun. It’s really fun. The blinking umbrella, there’s a line in the song [Sex, Drugs & Disco"] get out your soul umbrellas / cause what the weatherman tells us / it’s raining catechisms and dogmas. So I manifested that with the umbrella."

Beyond the things he has on stage with him, you can find Rogers gyrating and shaking his way around the stage in fits during his set. It's extremely engaging and brings out smiles all around the room. "Yeah I was sort of raised in theatre. I was a performer, I started out as an actor and so I guess that sort of stuck with me... you know some people are really good on stage with their hands... I just happen to do that with my whole body I guess. I don’t think I could perform with out doing that. I’m doing that when we’re recording too. So you can... Haha... Kind of have that image in your head. By the end of the song I end up six feet away from the mic."

Not only is this apparent in his stage antics, but if you listen closely to his lyrics, you'll find all manner of absurd and clever wordplay that comes out so fluidly and poetically, you barely notice how ridiculous some of it actually would sound in just regular conversation. "I think [I got the puns] from my grandfather. He’s always just a ham. I guess it’s just in my blood. You know my dad, he’s a really strong, silent type. We’re at dinner, we’ll have guests over, he’ll make sure that when the perfect opportunity arises he’ll make the quintessential joke. Send the guests home happy. But I dunno, I think that on an artistic level it’s more contradictions that appeal to me. And I think that everybody has contradictions. It’s just a way for me to get to everybody, cuz everybody can relate to that. But there’s some songs that are pretty nutty I guess." Look closely at his liner notes for The Dawn Of A New Error and you'll see he can't leave the wordplay alone, even in photos. In one shot of Rogers standing knee-deep in a choppy ocean, the rescue device he has hanging off his shoulder reads "LIFE SAVOUR."

Speaking of reaching out for life saving/savouring, belying the skippy, energetic tone of the music, many of the songs are riddled with dark, cloying overtones. I guess art is rarely a chipper thing, and being in an environment like Emily Carr, even for a year, probably doesn't help. "Usually I’ll write line by line and then cut and paste everything together. I’ll have like a big bag of poetry and … I like collage work, so I’ll just sit there and arrange everything and it becomes a story. So I guess most of the time I am in sort of a dark mindframe creatively. I don’t know why. The reason I started painting and writing and stuff like that was because… just sort of a way… not like a therapeutic sort of copout but more like a way to sort of fight fire with fire... You know, all that pain in my life I sort of fight with something creative... I guess I’m surprised at how happy I can be at times but still have the potential to write something sad or dark."

"Yeah I guess I just always thought that happiness was never something worth writing a song about."

Elsewhere

By Andy Scheffler
Photos : Tyrone Bruce
Published : May 2005.