B
enjamin Booker’s years in Los Angeles, at the tail end of the 2010s, were filled with exploration and experimentation. The singer-songwriter lived for a while in Echo Park, but spent a lot of his time downtown. He’d grab his skateboard, coast down Glendale Boulevard, and spend the day taking pictures, visiting museums, or hanging out (he eventually just moved downtown).
There was a Kerry James Marshall retrospective at the Museum of Contemporary Art in 2017 that he found “eye-opening” and “life-changing.” “Everything is done with purpose,” Booker recalls thinking. “I just wanted to move more like that.”
Meeting skateboarders, he marveled at how much physical harm they had to endure to master their art form. Comedians, too, opened themselves up to failure and refinement in fascinating ways. “Music is just so easy,” he began to think. “If you can’t be open to failure, what are you doing? There are other people literally breaking bones.”
Booker, for his part, was a success story in search of a new beginning. He broke through in 2014 with his self-titled debut, a furious blast of blues-punk, then built on it with 2017’s Witness, caked in glam-y grit, but steeped too in gospel, soul, and bits of hip-hop. Those albums took Booker — who grew up in a trailer park in the deep red outskirts of Tampa, Florida, and cut his teeth in Gainesville’s stalwart punk scene — around the world. He toured with Jack White, Neil Young, and Courtney Barnett, watched Lauryn Hill from side stage, and visited Daft Punk’s studio in Paris. He almost died, too, when a random shooting while riding his bike in New Orleans sent bullets whizzing by his head.
These near-death and impossibly alive experiences left Booker with similar sensations: “I can’t keep doing the same things.” He needed to “work differently, move differently, have more control over” what he was making. “But I didn’t have the knowledge at the time,” he says.
In Los Angeles, he began to attain it. At museums and skate parks; at the small clubs where he performed with the permission to experiment and try stuff out; in the living rooms of fellow musicians who were making glossy pop gems with just MIDI keyboards, a microphone, and a laptop. During these excursions, Booker listened to two albums on repeat: Mobb Deep’s Hell on Earth and the Jesus and Mary Chain’s Psychocandy. The idea for a new sound was percolating — “Wouldn’t this be the coolest record if you could put these together?” — he just had to figure out how to make it.
It took Booker a few more years, but his new album, Lower, out Jan. 24, 2025, on his new label, Fire Next Time Records, is the realization of that dream. He made it entirely with Kenny Segal, the producer best known for his work with rapper Billy Woods. “I talked to other people, but when I talked to Kenny, he knew exactly what I wanted to do,” Booker says.
Segal brought with him the long tradition of underground beatmaking, fusing that with Booker’s rock and pop bona fides, plus his new studies into all things distorted: the Velvet Underground, My Bloody Valentine, Tim Hecker. The new album’s first single, “Lwa in the Trailer Park,” marked the moment the two hit upon exactly what they were searching for — a squirming, agitated synth bass, blown-out drums kicking against the top of the mix, a hoarse roar of guitar.
“It was very exciting immediately,” Booker says. “I remember showing it to people and them being like, ‘I haven’t heard anything like this before.’ And I was like, ‘Great.’”
A
t the end of 2019, Booker and his partner left L.A. for Australia, where she’s from. They settled with their new daughter on the western coast in Perth. “It’s very slow out there,” Booker says, “and there’s this vibe, a real feeling of being on the edge of the planet. Like you’re separated from everything else. It was nice to have that.”
The pandemic and parenting forced Booker to adapt his creative practice, but for the better. Raising a child didn’t make him feel like he had less time; “it just made me concentrate more during the time I did have,” he says. And while he’d assumed he’d just “spend a shit ton of money” to make his new album in “a fancy studio,” now he and Segal were confined to their homes, half a world apart. So they started sending tracks and stems back-and-forth, building songs that way. They hardly spoke. The goal was clear. Both trusted the other’s contribution would only benefit the song. (The first time Booker and Segal met in person was last year, during a four-day session to finish Lower.)
“I didn’t know that you could have this kind of relationship with music,” Booker says. “I haven’t had anything like that before, where I have a lot of control, but I also have somebody to boost and support me when I needed it.”
When Booker started making music, he garnered momentum gradually, with his self-released 2012 EP Waiting Ones getting a boost from the blog Aquarium Drunkard and airplay on SiriusXM. He signed to indie heavyweight ATO in 2014 for his debut album. He’d succeeded by doing exactly what he wanted, but success, it turned out, came with conditions. “It was like, there are these people who are going to tell me what to do now,” he says. “If I wanted that, I would just get a job.”
Success also brought expectation. While making Witness, Booker recalls one person telling him he needed to “go back to playing guitar.” At another point, he says ATO “went into the studio and added guitars on songs behind my back. We took [them] out. But it was that kind of vibe.”
(ATO maintains that this is “not true.” In an email to Rolling Stone, label president Jon Salter says: “Nobody from ATO was ever in or near a recording studio during the Witness recording.” He does acknowledge that the label asked producer Sam Cohen to demo “one A&R idea” to add some supplemental acoustic rhythm guitar to the title track. Salter says they presented the demo to Booker, he rejected it, and it was scrapped. “Benjamin enjoyed full creative control over his music while on ATO across both albums,” Salter writes. “Ben approved every note, song, mix, master, sequence, artwork, photograph, video.”)
Booker’s ATO deal covered his first two records, and there were conversations about a third, but a deal never materialized. “I don’t look at it and fault them,” he says. “What I realized is, this is a label, they have their brand, and for a little bit, I fit into that brand and they had control over that. But I was starting to branch outside of that.”
He was “more hurt by some of the personal relationships,” he says. Ultimately, he adds: “When you’re on an independent label, you don’t expect those kinds of things to happen. But ‘independent labels’ — that doesn’t mean anything. They are huge companies run by businessmen. …. The big-name labels, they don’t want me coming in with a record that sounds like something they haven’t heard before.”
WORKING WITH SEGAL was easy, but that didn’t mean making Lower was. “I had a very clear idea of what I wanted to do, so it was more banging my head against the wall for years until I got what I wanted,” Booker says. In his frustration, he picked up painting, just so he’d have something else to do. Soon enough it was informing his music, pushing him to think about texture, symbolism, and imagery, as much as melody, words, and chords.
The result is an album that transmits frequencies both vivid and abstract, visceral and esoteric, chaotic and calm. “Lwa in the Trailer Park,” drawing on Haitian voodoo, is a plea for something more, something better, addressed to Marinette, the lwa (spirit) of power and violence, as well as liberation. “Slow Dance In a Gay Bar” follows that simple, tender image in the title to a bridge that’s all about arriving at a place where the world begins to open up more: “I am beginning to see the beauty all around me,” Booker sings. On “Rebecca Latimer Felton Takes a BBC,” Booker drew on Jeremy O. Harris’ Slave Play to write a song that contended with race, slavery, sex, and pornography, all centered around Felton — the first woman to serve in the Senate, and the last Senator to own slaves. (Booker also cracks, “I hated this woman so much that, honestly, my original intention was, I want people to Google this woman and find this [song] title.”)
Benjamin Booker in New Orleans, where he now lives.
DAYMON GARDNER for Rolling Stone
Booker aimed to write songs that “felt intimate,” but layered enough to reach the larger topics on his mind. He frequently thought of people living “on the outskirts of society, and what that does to them, mentally and emotionally.” He drew inspiration from the screenwriter and filmmaker Paul Schrader, whose work (Taxi Driver, Mishima, First Reformed) similarly centers on stories of outsiders pushed to, and often past, the point of breaking.
“There’s a lot of people now who feel like they’re at that place,” Booker says, adding: “People who can’t take the bullshit anymore — people lying to them, no one caring about them, living in a place where they have to fight all the time when there’s people who don’t have to live like that.”
Booker’s explorations, like Schrader’s, are not without danger, brutality, or fear. “Some Kind of Lonely” settles somewhere nearly beatific within the cascading fuzz of its guitars, arriving at an atmospheric bridge where Booker’s modest incantation — “I’m looking for the real thing, though, you know” — is interrupted suddenly by a burst of gunfire. The audio, he says, is sampled from a video of a school shooting. It’s followed closely by the sound of his daughter laughing.
It’s an extremely bold choice, and one Booker pulls off. The shock never fades, even on repeated listens, when you know what to expect. Booker says he included this audio because those random moments of horror “happen in our lives, just out of nowhere.”
While creating the sound of Lower, Booker thought carefully about the role he wanted his voice to play, envisioning it as a source of “comfort in chaos.” He thought of the famous sequence in 2001: A Space Odyssey when Dr. Dave Bowman leaves the ship in his little capsule to investigate the monolith, then gets yanked through the fabric of space-time. He thought, too, of a Kerry James Marshall painting that depicts a levitation, “When Frustration Threatens Desire.”
In a 1998 interview with Bomb, Marshall said he took the painting’s title from a line in Paul Garon’s book Blues and the Poetic Spirit: “Magic is evoked when frustration threatens desire.” Marshall continued: “It’s talking about the moments when voodoo and things like that are employed as devices to win over somebody, somebody that you usually want but can’t get.”
For Booker, that unrequited yearning is a desire to, as he repeats a few times on the album, live a good life. “A search for some kind of peace of mind in the chaos,” he says. “To feel like the singer on the album. I found this album to be kind of soothing to listen to. It’s almost like people watching crime shows, where you’re safe in your living room and experiencing this really intense feeling. The album feels chaotic, but there’s also me not giving off that energy at the same time. There’s a feeling of safety in an unsafe situation.”
AT THE END of 2023, Booker and his family moved back to the U.S., settling in New Orleans, where he had lived earlier between Florida and Los Angeles. It’s a music town, but as Booker happily notes, “There’s no music business here… It’s such a rat race in some places, and it doesn’t feel like that here.”
He’s fascinated, too, by the tension between the city’s dark history and its reputation for uninhibited excess. “It was one of the biggest slave ports, but at the same time, it’s this tourist destination where people come and drink and party,” Booker says. “I do believe places have energies, and it has such an intense, weird energy. Like, who knows how much blood is in this ground? But also people are just having the time of their life. It’s endlessly fascinating to walk through that on a daily basis.”
Next year, he’ll return to the road in support of Lower, with Segal joining him both as an opener, and as a member of Booker’s live band with drummer Mekala Session. “How the songs are going to work live is going to be interesting for you and for me,” Booker says with a laugh.
Until then, he’ll be living his life as simply as possible, hanging out with his family, making music, answering, in a way, the question Lower repeatedly asks. “To me, I guess, a good life is what I have now,” he says. “Having control over the music I make, making stuff that excites me, and working with people that I respect.”
