| Ben&Jason say Goodbye
Ben&Jason release their fourth and final album on 6th October Goodbye, their first release since 2001’s Ten Songs About You, is a collection of nine intimate songs, recorded with longtime collaborator and producer Tom Aitkenhead at the same rat-ridden railway arch they’ve been using since their first demos. According to Ben, Goodbye was ‘the easiest album to make – from conception to completion it was very smooth. Apart from a six month period in the middle where we didn’t have a record deal.’ ‘Goodbye became homeless the day after my 31st birthday,’ says Jason, ‘and we found ourselves trying to get it new lodgings at the same time people started saying it was the best thing we’d done, which was helpful.’ The album was quickly picked up by Keith Cullen at Setanta, one of the few truly independent labels in the industry. ‘Setanta’s the perfect home for our last sprog,’ says Ben. ‘We’ve always felt at home anywhere that doesn’t try to push square pegs into round holes.’ Goodbye is the boys’ most assured and heartfelt album since their 1999 début, Hello. According to Jason, it’s ‘almost a full-circle return. Sometimes, when a song works effortlessly with just an acoustic guitar and a vocal, it pays to make no extra effort.’ For Ben, it ‘nicely documents the beginning of my late 20's ego crash.’ The title for the album, which is ‘about as straight-ahead as it comes,’ says Ben, seemed the obvious candidate: many of the songs touch on changes of circumstance, and, as Jason says, ‘our usual subtext: loss.’ And the double-whammy of it being the boys’ farewell as a duo evolved through circumstance. ‘We felt we ought to be honest enough to give our pet project a shelf life,’ says Jason. ‘And when you’ve been signed, fêted and dropped, it’s hard not to regard that as the end of a cycle.’ Ben&Jason, however, have no plans to drop off the radar. Ben has secreted himself away from the world to ‘pour everything into a new and very different project,’ while Jason has spent most of the year ‘being freighted across the planet’ with Beth Gibbons & Rustin’ Man, between writing The Framley Examiner and ‘trying to find out what Ben’s new project is.’ 13 August 2003 |
