TMPB Recordings

This is the first draft (and full transcript) of Jeff Jacoby's interview with Paul Benshoof. Unfortunately, Jeff's editor would not accept the full interview as written, as the copy ran far too long for the space allocated. However, with Jeff's permission, we have published the entire interview here for your enjoyment. We believe you will find that it provides much more detail and insight (as well as more humor) than the version that was ultimately submitted for publication.

With his sixth album Still I Sing, New Mexico resident Paul Benshoof continues to win over the hearts of many. And he’ll probably capture some more, who are likely to fawn over Benshoof’s sultry voice and folksy riffs, if not drawing inspiration from his words and the music itself. But there’s more to Benshoof than meets the eye. Paul Benshoof uses all of his brain. The scientific side won him a degree in computer engineering from Syracuse University, while the artsy portion allows him to strum a guitar and tickle piano ivories with intricate perfection. A mix of up-tempo rock and folksy ballads along with storytelling lyrics and a well-enunciated voice, Benshoof proves to be talented and will be sure to attract lovers of the ‘60’s and ‘70’s folk rock genre.

I got a chance to sit down and talk to Paul, who graciously offered an insightful and humorous discussion about himself, his music, and venom-spitting women.

JEFF JACOBY:
First of all, Paul, I want to congratulate you on your new album. I think, and I know many agree with me, that this is your best album in years.

PAUL BENSHOOF:
Well, thanks, Jeff. But let’s be perfectly clear: this is my only album in years. Twelve, to be exact.

JJ:
[Laughs] OK. Twelve years. Yeah, that’s a long time. So, why the long wait?

PB:
Well, it’s funny. I woke up one morning and found myself married with children. It was right around then that I discovered my time was basically spoken for.

JJ:
[Laughs] Yeah, I can imagine how that could be a problem.

PB:
Oh, it’s not a problem. It’s a conscious decision I made when I chose to have a family. I mean, why have a family if you’re not going to spend quality time with them? I’m away from home enough as it is, and I didn’t need another excuse not to be available. I mean, I know I could have carved out some time over the last twelve years to release an album, but it was out prioritized by what I considered to be more important.

JJ:
But don’t you regret stepping away from the industry for such an extended period of time?

PB:
First of all, let’s remember that I didn’t totally step away from the industry. [Over the last twelve years] I’ve produced a number of albums for other artists on my label, written and recorded a few tunes used in independent movie soundtracks, and have continued to support musicians all over the world. So, I’ve been engaged to some extent, but yeah, I’ve missed recording and releasing albums of personal material. That’s really why I started in this business, and not doing it created a bit of a void that I felt. But by the same token, the absence really helped me re-appreciate the recording process once I started again, so I can’t say my decision to wait was really a bad thing.

JJ:
But not releasing an album for so long, didn’t you miss the cash flow—especially when you had a family to feed?

PB:
[Laughs] Not releasing an album probably helped my cash flow! Really, it takes time, money and all sorts of other resources to release an album, and in today’s climate, chances are slim that album sales will recoup those costs, even if it sells well. Let me tell you, in the music industry, an album ought to be thought of as a marketing device to promote music, not an end unto itself. If done correctly, an album will help you get better paying gigs and sell other merchandise. That’s where the imminent money is. After that—usually long after that—if your songwriting is solid and album sales are up, you can start to see residual income via royalties. I’ve been lucky to always turn a profit with my albums, but the profit doesn’t show up overnight, and I wouldn’t count on that income to feed my family. At least not yet.

JJ:
So then, does most of your income come from producing other people’s albums or gigging?

PB:
Neither. No, for personal reasons, I moved my family from a major music center to a tiny resort community in the mountains, so the business base isn’t really there to sustain a career as a producer, at least to the degree necessary for raising a family the way I want to. And quite frankly, I don’t do a lot of gigging anymore. It would just take more time away from the family. Most of my income comes from outside of the music industry these days. I’m a computer engineer and have spent most of the last twelve years in GPS test and evaluation. The income I get from my musical pursuits is nice, but that’s generally not how I pay bills.

JJ:
So, you’re actually a geek?

PB:
I’m a musician trapped in an engineer’s body.

JJ:
[Laughs] Wow. I’ve never heard of that.

PB:
It’s more common than you might expect. In dealing with other engineers in my field, I’ve come across all sorts who are very talented musicians. In fact, even when I was in L.A., the other guitarist in my band [Lynn Anderson] was also an engineer. It’s great working with guys like Lynn, because they usually don’t bring the emotional and behavioral baggage that often comes with full-time musicians.

JJ:
But you often work alone, correct?

PB:
Right. I usually record alone.

JJ:
How does that work?

PB:

Very well! I almost never experience creative differences among my band members! [Laughs] Actually, it’s all done through multi-track recording. I play the individual instruments and sing all the vocals, and then I layer them together to get the sound I want.

JJ:
That sounds like a long process.

PB:
It can be. When I first started, I could usually write and record a song in just a few hours. Now, I’m a lot pickier about the end result, and it can sometimes take up to a month.

JJ:
No wonder it took you so long to release this last album…

PB:
Actually, I did it over a one-year period, and that was a feat in and of itself, having been out of practice for such a long time.

JJ:
So, after a twelve-year wait, what made you finally decide that it was time to record this album?

PB:
A number of things, actually. One, my son Aaron has really become an avid guitarist, and I got a little envious that he was playing guitar more often than I was. I was eager to get back into it but was having trouble finding the time, so he was really an inspiration that motivated me to just do it and get started again. Two, last year I took a job that caused me to be out of town for a while—remember, I have to feed my family somehow—so suddenly I had an opportunity to get some recording done without taking more time away from my family. I took a portion of my studio with me and set it up in a little apartment while I was living alone. And three, a lot has changed in my life since releasing [previous album] “Won’t You Leave Me Alone?”, and since my albums have always been somewhat autobiographical, it seemed like I needed to fill in the gap.

JJ:
Let’s talk about that. A lot of artists would probably consider their music to be autobiographical. Is telling your story what drives you to make music?

PB:
Well, it’s not like I have a laundry list of personal drama I’m dying to tell people about, but yeah, I enjoy writing about my experiences—if for no other reason than to give me something tangible to analyze so that I can figure out what happened! [Laughs] But that’s not the only reason I write. If my songs were just about me, I doubt if people would really care because I don’t think I go through much that other people don’t also experience on one level or another. I mean, I’m sure people who know me can listen to my songs and generally know what situation I’m singing about, but what’s more important is that other people can relate to the songs and recognize that I’m singing about something they’ve gone through.

JJ:
So, would you say this album is mostly for you or for the listener?

PB:
Actually, this album has a lot of love songs on it. I’d say it’s mostly for my wife! [Laughs]

JJ:
Yeah, this one is notably different than your previous albums. What caused that?

PB:
Marriage and children! [Laughs] You need to remember that my previous five albums were recorded when I was single, and back then my motivation for life in general was completely different. That’s why a lot of my earlier songs dealt with struggling with relationships and the frustration of failing relationships. I don’t regret those emotions—they certainly provided me with a lot of material—but they’re really no longer part of my life, and it seemed wrong that women who are no longer part of my life had become part of my musical legacy while my loving wife was not. I wanted to make that right.

JJ:
So, the girls you knew while you were single gave you five albums of material? You had a pretty adventurous single life, for a geek. [Laughs]

PB:
Well, we don’t know how many albums of material they collected on me! [Laughs]

JJ:
But seriously, when I listen to your earlier work, excuse me for stereotyping, but I don’t picture an engineer going through those experiences. I picture engineers huddled around a computer monitor playing with their slide rules. [Laughs] Your life seems to be anything but that!

PB:
Well, don’t be fooled. I spend plenty of time in front of a computer monitor, although I’m really not a slide rule kind of guy. [Laughs] But really, my life actually isn’t quite as interesting as some of my songs may have led you to believe, but they are all autobiographical to a certain extent, although I’ll admit I took plenty of artistic liberty with some of the situations to make the songs more entertaining. And I guess I should clarify that the handful of girls I knew back then weren’t exactly the fickle, self-serving, man-hating, venom-spitting heartbreakers that were often portrayed [in my lyrics].

JJ:
[Laughs] I hope not.

PB:
Actually, I’ve been blessed with great people in my life, and quite frankly, if those girls were that terrible, I never would have been with them in the first place. Overall, they really were great people and probably still are. But here’s the problem: when things were going well, it was hard for me to stop reveling in the moment to write a song about it, so I seldom wrote about the good times. It was a whole lot easier to wait until something went wrong and then pour those frustrations into my music.

JJ:
Well, I guess that technique worked for you.

PB:
Yeah. Not that all my songs were like that, but I guess I number of them were. Often, to come up with a good song, I’d borrow negative qualities from every bad experience I ever had and roll them together to create the she-devil from hell. [Laughs] Actually, I don’t think any of the song characters were quite that bad. [Laughs] So yeah, there were exaggerations, but the songs were really based on actual experiences, most of the time.

JJ:
Were there any exceptions to that rule, basing songs on actual experiences?

PB:
Well, not really on [Still I Sing], but yeah, there probably are some older songs that fall into that category.

JJ:
Like what?

PB:
Well, some of those songs weren’t actually about me, per se. Sometimes I’d create a character or situation based on someone else I knew. Or actually, there have been occasions where I’d write a song just as an exercise, and it really wouldn’t mean anything too profound. “Where the Children Still Play” from my previous album is a good example of that. But generally speaking, I get my best songs when I stick to personal experiences. Even if it’s a ridiculously comical experience, there’s usually a point to be made or a truth to reveal.

JJ:
Writing about personal experiences would make some people feel vulnerable. But not you, I take it.

PB:
No. Actually, I don’t worry about that at all, but what I sometimes need to be careful about is embellishing my songs to the point that they lack the poignant truth I’m striving for. I’ve gotten occasionally carried away with artistic license in the past, so now I do strive to keep things in check to keep songs from going wrong.

JJ:
So, give me an example of a song gone wrong.

PB:
That’s tough. There’s probably a bunch! [Laughs] Well OK, like “The Syracuse Blues,” from the “Won’t You Leave Me Alone?” album. That pretty much stands out as one of my biggest songwriting regrets.

JJ:
Why?

PB:
Because the story in that song isn’t even close to being true. It was originally about missing my girlfriend when I moved off to college, but, you know, this was before I had really started recording so I never really did anything with it. In fact, I think we broke up before I could sing it for her. That figures, huh? [Laughs] But anyway, I kind of resurrected it again when I started getting into bluesy-type music in the early nineties. I liked the song and wanted to record it, but the lyrics really didn’t fit with the theme of the rest of the album, so I changed them and turned it into a break-up song with sentiments that really couldn’t have been any further from the truth.

JJ:
I see.

PB:
Yeah, and I consider that a problem. At the time, I reasoned that it would be OK to rewrite the song, since she would probably never hear it anyway—and that’s probably true—but I never felt right about it. She was great, and the song was an absolute betrayal of the feelings I actually had. Well, that’s not why I write music, and I wish I hadn’t done it.

JJ:
Maybe you should write an apology song?

PB:
Yeah, right. I’m sure recording a sentimental song for an old girlfriend would go over well with my wife. [Laughs] If I did that, I bet I could find some material for another song about a venom-spitting woman.

JJ:
[Laughs] Well, since you’re not writing songs like that at the moment, are you worried that your new material will alienate you from your fans?

PB:
No, not really. I checked with both of them, and they said the new material was OK.

JJ:
[Laughs] That’s funny. Let’s talk about the album art. The cover shows you playing your guitar on train tracks as a train is speeding towards you. I think it’s a cool shot, but what’s it supposed to represent?

PB:
Well, it shows me continuing to make music against all odds, which is basically what the song “Still I Sing” is all about. Remember, I recorded this album in a little apartment, and it didn’t thrill some of my neighbors. I was threatened with legal action, including eviction, if I didn’t cease and desist.

JJ:
So what did you do?

PB:
Oh, I ignored them and finished the album, obviously. [Laughs] Hey, I waited twelve years to make this album, and I wasn’t going to let anything stop me!

JJ:
[Laughs] And I’m glad you persevered. It’s got some good stuff on it, and it doesn’t sound like it was recorded in a little apartment. That’s impressive.

PB:
Thank you.

JJ:
So, what’s been the defining moment of your musical career to this point? What was the part where you’re just like “this really feels great?”

PB:
Quite honestly, I get that feeling every time I release an album. It always feels great, and what I think I enjoy most is the fan feedback. I always poll them to determine which songs were the best on the album, and eventually certain songs will bubble to the top of the list, but individual votes show that different songs really do appeal to different people.

JJ:
Explain.

PB:
Well, almost always, I can count on one person’s least favorite song to be someone else’s favorite. In fact, on most of my albums, every one of the songs will be someone’s favorite, and I think that’s great. That means that to some degree, each of my songs resonate with someone.

JJ:
Interesting. How are the new songs resonating?

PB:
So far, great. It’s still early, but initial feedback has been very positive.

JJ:
Do you think this means you’ll continue to write love songs?

PB:
That’s a good question. I mean, I sure hope that I have a continued reason to be inspired to write honest love songs. It beats going through an experience with one of those evil woman characters! But I don’t know. I like the new album a lot, but I’ll admit that it’s a little heavy on the light stuff, if you know what I mean. Writing love songs was a good experience, and I’m glad people like them, but I’m not sure that I want to plan on doing it exclusively. I’d rather just see where life takes me and continue the autobiographical journey.

JJ:
And I’m sure it will be an adventurous one. So, basically just kind of as a last statement, for people who haven’t found Paul Benshoof and checked out what your music’s about, what’s the reason they should do that?

PB:
To enjoy good music that doesn’t seem to get the kind of attention it once did. Generally speaking, the industry has pretty much moved away from the genre of music I write and play, but I still enjoy it and I know a lot of other people feel the same way. I’m a sucker for coherent words put to a good, listenable melody. If you are too, then you should check out my music. That’s what I strive to deliver.