It hasn’t taken long for Melbourne based singer songwriter Ben Abraham to capture the attention and hearts of music lovers across the country thanks to the release of his truly stunning new LP Sirens.
Ben’s honest songwriting and disarming stage presence has seen him grow in the last two years from a well-kept hometown secret into an independent artist with a passionate international following.
He’s just recently released his brand new LP Sirens (via Inertia) and to celebrate he’s kindly penned for us a track by track run down of the record, which you can check out below.
SIRENS
‘Sirens’ was the last song I wrote on the album. I always knew I wanted to open the whole thing with a choral arrangement of the motif from ‘A Quiet Prayer’ but wasn’t sure beyond that. We recorded the vocals in the hallway of an old stone church and Jono sent through a mix shortly after. I remember taking a drive through Melbourne one night as I listened to the voices on loop, and the word sirens came to me. I wrote the song on the spot.
Helen’s high note at 0:50 is one of my favourite moments on the album.
TIME
‘Time’ is the oldest song on the record. I wrote it, when I was still a screenwriting student, as a song that could play over the opening credits of a script I was writing. Dealing with the passing of time with such melancholy was a recurring theme in my early writing.
I BELONG TO YOU
I was listening to a lot of Nickel Creek during my first years as a songwriter and you can hear their influence in this tune and in ‘She’. ‘I Belong To You’ was always performed acoustically, so pulling the album arrangement together was a challenge. It’s one of the tunes that taught me that a song is allowed to exist in multiple forms. It’s also interesting to reflect on how I grappled with the theme of loneliness as a 22-year-old.
SHE
I wrote this song with my friend John Flanagan who penned the second verse. I like hearing the difference in writing style between his verse and mine. It was always intended to be performed as a duet and perhaps one of the only production regrets I have is not singing it with him on the record. I guess there’s always the 10th anniversary edition.
YOU AND ME
This was one of those songs that sat at the bottom of the pile for a long time and I never thought it would get recorded. The demo was just a piano/vocal and it wasn’t until Leigh pushed us to try a full arrangement that I considered it for the album. The moment I heard Pat’s bass-line, I knew it would work.
COLLIDE
I wrote this song on my first trip to the US having just ended a relationship. A friend let me play on their piano for an afternoon and hanging on the wall was a framed illustration of two people looking up at the night sky with a satellite flying by and the word Gravity written beneath them. I wrote the song in one sitting though it took me a while to show it to anyone because I was worried it sounded like a Backstreet Boys song. Not that there’s anything wrong with that.
TO LOVE SOMEONE
The melody for this song was bouncing around my head for at least a year before I knew what it was about. Once I figured out that I wanted to end each section with “to love someone, that’s where you belong”, the rest fell into place pretty quickly. I enjoy writing songs with a more traditional form than just the typical structure of verse-chorus-verse-chorus.
HOME
For a long time this song was called ‘September’ until I realised how many songs started with ‘S’ on the tracklist. There are days that I feel more proud of this song than any of the others.
THIS IS ON ME
From the moment we met, Sara and I tried to find ways to collaborate – but never wanted to force it. When she agreed to appear on my record, we set about exploring different songs she could sing – even considered making ‘She’ a male/female duet at one point.
I remembered I had a voice memo of half a song that at the time was called ‘Wrecking Ball’. I sent her the memo, she sent back a verse and here it is – renamed for obvious reasons.
SPEAK
For years this song was only played on piano and it was very hard for me to consider it as being anything else. It was a true case of having to let go and trust the people I was working with and I’m so glad they pushed me out of my comfort zone. The sonic universe of this song is incredible and the brilliance and subtlety of Leigh’s percussion is on full display. You can’t often call a drummer patient but ‘Speak’ is what it sounds like when you find one who is.
I was also really anxious about recording the vocal for ‘Speak’ because I had always felt like it got the better of me. I asked Wally De Backer to help record the vocals because he has such a restrained approach to his singing and I knew he could help guide me to tell the narrative properly. We spent a few days at his barn and came up with what you hear now.
SOMEBODY’S MOTHER
I wrote this song for my friend Hilde with whom I initially bonded over a shared love of Leonard Cohen’s ‘Famous Blue Raincoat’. The opening line and letter-style lyric of ‘Somebody’s Mother’ is a direct homage to that song. It was the first time I had written a song by getting the title first.
SONGBIRD
This song was a challenge to produce and perform. I wanted it on the album but it was stylistically so different to the others that it took a bit of push and pull to find an arrangement that worked.
It was also a nightmare recording the vocal performance for it. I tried five different sessions (across two continents) before I got something I was ok with. Only just ok.
A QUIET PRAYER
We tried recording this song a few different ways until we decided to just do it live in Jono’s lounge room. If you listen closely you can hear a car drive past at one point. I like that.
