Ben de la Cour mines his personal life for musical inspiration. And he’s lived one hell of a life so far.
Raised in Brooklyn, he started playing music in his teens, including shows at CBGBs. He left home for Cuba where he boxed and busked for money before landing in New Orleans bartending and bouncing for tourists and local barflies. Now in East Nashville, the mecca for modern Americana and folk music, he finally focused on his long history of addiction and mental illness. Clean now for several years, he works with troubled/mentally ill youth, and also writes remarkably affecting music that doesn’t shy away from the darker moments in life. God, death and loss feature prominently throughout his albums.
Sweet Anhedonia is no different. It serves as a natural follow-up to 2020’s Shadow Land, an equally darkly beautiful collection of Southern Gothic folk and Americana tunes. The cello-heavy opening track, “Appalachian Book of the Dead,” an addictively, groove-heavy song, has an interesting origin story. He was contacted by a group looking to pair authors and songwriters together on a project. De la Cour was matched with Dale Neal who wrote a novel from which the song title was taken. The result is as striking as it is eerie.
Along with his own experiences, de la Cour also mixes in plenty of characters to help narrate his songs, like “Numbers Game,” a track he wrote with Canadian musician Lynne Hanson, a dark, moving song about how people manage to somehow be resilient in spite of pain and innumerable obstacles. Becky Warren sings alongside de la Cour on the track. “I’ve always enjoyed writing songs from the female perspective. I don’t ever really set out to write a song about anything, nor do I consider from whose perspective the story will be told. I just let the characters talk to me. And I realized right away that this song would have to be from that perspective,” he says.
The album closes on the surprisingly hopeful, if slightly resigned, “I’ve Got Everything I Ever Wanted,” a delicately beautiful acoustic number that pairs de la Cour’s effortless vocals with a fiddle. de la Cour proves to be the next in line of insightful Americana songsmiths following Isbell, Bingham, and Snider where twang mixes with valiant story-telling.
