The Journey to the Middle
Aaron Benjamin releases his debut album
Words and photographs by Katie Sikora
“People should care about it because it’s good music. And that’s something I’ve learned. I really shouldn’t expect people to care about it for any reason other than that. I have immense personal conviction when it comes to this album. I have a million reasons why I care about it. But when it comes to music, man, if people connect to it then they should care about it.”
I was standing in front of One Eyed Jacks in the French Quarter at one o’clock in the morning when I met Aaron Cohen (known professionally as Aaron Benjamin) — and it was overwhelming. Overwhelming because I had just finished shooting a high energy Stoop Kids set. Overwhelming because a very tall, very fast-talking college junior was suddenly speaking a mile a minute at me. Overwhelming because he knew my name and much, much more about me than I knew about him. But it was mostly overwhelming because Aaron brought with him the beautiful and unparalleled energy of a person who has things to accomplish before they have accomplished them.
“We’re going to work together. I need you to shoot for me.” That was…something along the lines of what Aaron confessed to me that first night in the Quarter — it was almost two years ago, cut me some slack. And he wasn’t wrong. We have worked together on many shows and photo shoots in the nearly two years since that night. But the kicker came last fall when I returned from a two-month sabbatical and was putting together a roster of artists to follow on a more in-depth basis for the purposes of telling their stories. I realized I did not and could not forgo the opportunity to be working with him on, well, anything he was working on. He is too good and I didn’t want to miss out. It would be very simplistic to chalk that up to the recently coined terminology of FOMO but it goes beyond that. Aaron is so ready to write and sing and work and then write and sing some more that it hurts and that pain and that passion is palpable.
“His songs are very real. He’s unpretentious at how he goes about his music and I feel like he really puts all his emotion into his songs. And you can tell that the songs are very personal to him and that’s a very good quality for songwriters to have. Aaron is knowledgeable about music and he knows what he wants to hear,” said guitarist Ari Teitel. “He gives a lot of direction which is good because a lot of singers just don’t know what they want. They don’t know when to sing, when not to sing. Aaron is already pretty musically mature. I say that because I’ve worked with singers old enough to be our parents that don’t have that stuff figured out like Aaron does.”
And so, after inviting myself over to Aaron’s house for an epically cryptic meeting, I looked him in the eye and said, “We are going to work together.”
Aaron wrote “Blaze” when he was a sophomore in high school. While it is a song that has a tangible story seemingly outlined in the lyrics, it is in actuality about anger. It is a song about angst. He was young, fifteen years old, heartbroken the way only a fifteen-year old can be heartbroken, and was mad about it. The anger he felt was personified into the image of a fire.
“Somehow in my fifteen-year old mind I was walking into the blaze. Like you lit the fire and I walked myself into [it]. Because I was angry, I was red hot, you know? It lent itself too well to a song to not be a song. It’s not a complicated connection to make,” and while it is the oldest song on the record, “That’s still my favorite song to play, maybe. I fucking love playing that song.”
Now, it does not come as a surprise to me that the song he wrote after writing “Blaze”, a song about being hurt by someone he cared for, is a song about being unable to commit to the new people in his life. It’s a phenomenon that many of us have experienced and have had to deal with in our adult lives. But arguably the best part about “Wait Round” is that Aaron wrote it the very next year, while still in high school, at the age of seventeen. His lyrics exemplify a very real, very confusing situation when you have a person and you like them — hell maybe you even love them — and you can’t get enough of them. But you still find yourself unable to say yes. He writes,
“The other night I tried to call, girl you knew that wasn’t all that I intended, you said that thing you always say that makes me call back every day, girl I can’t stand it, well I can’t fight it anymore, you got me hooked, I’m on your line, now I’m running to the door, girl you got me every time.”
Commitment issues are no stranger to humanity and at the age of seventeen, Aaron was already delving into a well-known psychological issue through his songwriting.
“He honestly has a lyrical sense that is so rare for someone his age and is relatively rare in the New Orleans scene. I’ve talked with [him] about this too and he thinks about songwriting in the same way. For a song to come together where not only the shape of them feels good and aligned but the meaning also leads you to a greater understanding or an emotional reaction and then they’re surrounded by an architecture of music. Those are the three things that for me if it comes together then I think it’s a good song. And he has that on his songs,” says Dillon Frazier, drummer on the album.
Bassist Sam Weil credits his writing style and talent to his disposition. “Aaron’s personality plays into his songwriting. He really cares about his
family and he cares about his friendships and he just cares a lot. He gets really intense in the things he’s dealing with. And focused. He gets blinders on. So microscopically focused. Like before every show, he flips out. Or coming to New Orleans four years ago he was like, I’m going to write a song about this shit because I’m excited. He gets very worked up about this shit.”
“Good Morning New Orleans” is that song. He had spent his life up to that point outside of Detroit, Michigan and the song is about moving here. It’s about starting a new life. It’s about gaining a certain freedom that you don’t have until you move out from under your parent’s roof. It was written in anticipation of moving to New Orleans, having only ever visited the city before. It’s poppy and it’s cheesy to a certain extent. But cheesy can be ok when it is coming from a place of honesty because who doesn’t look back at their younger selves and think they were at one time cheesy? “But it is totally one hundred percent accurate of the way I felt at the time that I wrote it. And I was 18. Being a musician, moving to New Orleans, starting this new life, that is a cheesy notion. It is cliché and I like [it].”
Aaron was through his freshman year of college and was making money of his own for the first time while on the precipice of falling in love again. There was a girl from Napa Valley, California and upon realizing that he could deposit all of his checks in his bank account and buy a plane ticket, he did just that. He was eighteen. He was an adult, he could do whatever he wanted. And either subconsciously or consciously, he made the commitment he was unable to make two years before. They road tripped from Napa Valley to San Francisco to Los Angeles. Then there was a moment. A moment in a valley between two mountains when Aaron and a girl were laying in the valley and the moon came up before the sun went down and life changed.
“The valley as I would refer to it throughout our relationship became symbolic of a good place to be. A happy, comfortable, safe place. And that’s how I [still] feel about it now. When I wrote it, it was about the experience directly but now retrospectively with that relationship being over it is a reflection on it as a very short but impactful period of my life, that week. And I’m nostalgic about it, that will always be good times. In the future looking back on that, that will be a very special period of my life that I’ll cherish in the future. Because at the time it felt like adulthood beginning in a way.”
The next two songs that fall chronologically on the debut album fascinate me. Both signify not only spectacularly written prose but juxtapose two distinct viewpoints of his life. “Abraham” was Aaron’s great-grandfather. They never met but there is evidence throughout Aaron’s life of his existence. He is the fourth generation living on the same land in Huntington Woods, Michigan and without ever having had the chance to meet him, Aaron has picked up clues about who he was and what his life was like through pieces left behind: a clay bust shows what he used to look like; a box of letters written to his wife and children describes his experiences during the war; an apple tree in the backyard remains as a gift to his grandsons; a tool bench still stands as a reminder of his own trials and hard work. And after having been away from Detroit for two years, this song is Aaron’s connection to his home, his family, and to Abraham.
It’s a heart-wrenching song. But it is not until it is placed side by side with “Alright, OK” that the listener understands his development of a new kind of home.
“I’m loving living with the notion that I’m finally free, home’s where my heart is but my heart is my guitar and my guitar’s with me.”
He is embracing his “new” life. The one where he is free. Free to do what he wants, be where he wants, with who he wants and when he wants. Although there is still the thread that ties him back and keeps him grounded: home can be anywhere but the guitar must be there. That sense of familiarity and comfort must be present. “Home is where the axe is” is a sentiment that Aaron has conveyed to me throughout our working relationship and it is so stripped down, so real to me. For some, the physical home, the house, the furniture, the photos on the walls are what makes them feel settled. Aaron’s criteria is much simpler. He just needs to be able to make music in a space to feel at home there.
“It takes a certain kind of bravery to wear that emotion on your sleeve and whether he’s brave or not he wears that emotion on his sleeve and that’s incredibly endearing. That’s certainly something I want to capture,” expressed producer and engineer Chris Finney prior to the recording of the album.
“Terra Cotta” was the first song Aaron ever played for me. It was our first official meeting after he rushed me at the Stoop Kids show. He had also very recently returned from studying abroad for a semester in Prague. I didn’t know it at the time but whereas “Alright, OK” expresses safety and satisfaction in his music-making, “Terra Cotta” tells about when the safety net dissolves. The song is an epic and it tells the story of a journey: it ends in an entirely different place than it begins. Prague represented a time in his life when he was ecstatic and grateful to be studying and living in a foreign country, in exploring an entirely new place, and to be out of his comfort zone. But the time away also represented a feeling of stagnancy, of feeling stuck. He had his guitar and he had the ability to create new music but it simply wasn’t enough. Being so distanced from the life he had created in New Orleans left him feeling like he couldn’t move forward. How do you enjoy the present when your mind is occupied with thoughts of getting back home to accomplish your your dreams? When Aaron described this song to me, he provided me with an image of a person trekking through a desert with a load on their back. They are not where they started, they are not yet where they are going to end, and they are currently stuck in the middle just trying to make it to the point where they feel like the journey is over.
I met Aaron shortly after he returned to the United States from that trip and while he has been trekking towards the first record, the journey is far from being over. That’s the nature of the artistic process. By the time a person reaches the goal they thought would put them at the end of the trail, the next even more monumental goal has formed and is looming further in the distance. Not only that, with each new target, the obstacles become larger and more potentially detrimental. One such obstacle for Aaron was the death of a musical icon during the last semester of his senior year. Prince had died and he felt like shit and as a coping mechanism for being uncertain about life and his hero dying, “Louder” came to be. “That’s something I’ve done since I was a little kid as a means of coping with anger, turning my guitar up really loud or hitting the drums and I guess that’s childish but I grew up with that being the way that I would calm myself down from shit.”
The stories told in each of Aaron’s songs make up his debut record: a mere fraction of his catalogue, they contribute to a much larger story. It’s his story of growing up. It follows him as he moves and occupies new spaces beginning in his first years of high school and bringing him straight through to college graduation. After being out of school for a few years, it can be very easy to look back on that period in our lives with rose colored glasses. But we all know they were not easy as we were living them. Much like I as a photographer am keeping a visual record as I grow up and learn to navigate my life and it’s place in the larger scheme, Aaron has documented those same moments for himself in his songs. Not only that, but each time he gets on stage to play the songs again, he has the ability to revisit and stay connected to the pain of losing someone you worship, the ecstasy of moving to a new city, the confusion of feeling untethered and lost in the unfamiliar, the beauty of falling in love, the curiosity of learning about someone you’ve never met, and the freedom you feel when you discover it’s all entirely up to you.
