Interview: Ben Bostick, a kingpin of ‘Hellfire’ & brimstone

Ben Bostick rolls out of bed, tussles his bed head and hits the work grind before the sun peeks and yawns over the horizon. It’s a mundane life cycle, one to which many of the American working class can connect, characterized with tired eyes, rough hands and long hours. Bostick hinges this way of life with “Work, Sleep, Repeat,” a honky-tonk romper cut from his second album, Hellfire, out now on Simply Fantastic Music. His vocal is equally as listless and allows the song to inhabit that lethargic pace between the moon’s final march and the sun’s drowsy blink. “Sometimes at work, I just sit around and fantasize about how I could save myself from dying in this working life,” he barks. But his fate is already sealed. He’s a working man. And that’s all there is about that. “Somewhere up the line I forgot what I was working for / There goes life, looks like it ain’t slowing down for me.”

Hellfire is not necessarily a betrayal of his usual tendencies, but when he mounted a prolonged residency at Los Angeles’ The Escondite in early 2016, he was met with coldness. “Most of the music I had written up to that point was more in line with the songs on my first album, in the vein of Jason Isbell and Sturgill Simpson and the more singer-songwriter-y country folks,” he tells B-Sides & Badlands over a recent email chain. It was evident the crowd wasn’t as keen on the more intimately-spaced stories, so he began to craft lyrics amidst a bed of the “fast, loud” arrangements, which gave him ample room for “ripping solos,” even if he wasn’t able to flex restraint nearly as much. Throughout much of the record, from the savagely fiery “Feeling Mean,” complete with devilish flames, spitting from Satan’s tongue, to the raucous “No Show Blues” scorcher to the rock ‘n roller “Blow Off Some Steam,” he unleashes all hell, so to speak.

“After awhile, I decided that all these barnburners might make a good album, and I slowly focused in on a sound and a lyrical theme and finally the goal of steering my country band toward making the best punk album of the year. The aim at the end was to make the ‘Raw Power’ [the 1973 studio album by The Stooges] of country music,” writes Bostick, who was joined by producer John Would, known for his work with Warren Zevon, Lucinda Williams and Fiona Apple, in the studio, splicing together his dirty edges with a super-charged high-class buoyancy. Heeding The Escondite crowd, he converted the real-life figures into fantastical characters embedded in the album’s walls. “The crowd is generally a bunch of jaded regulars who desperately want to hate whoever is on stage. So, to turn the crowd in your favor is quite a task. The characters in my songs are the characters in the bar,” he says.

Songs like “No Good Fool,” which cavorts with the Devil on the dance floor, were born out of an avoidance of becoming a covers band. “There was a time when my band was playing a lot of country dance clubs, and all the patrons of these places like to do line dances. My worst nightmare is being in a cover band, so instead of learning a bunch of other people’s songs I decided to write a few line dances of my own,” he explains of the song, which is, on a basic level, “an electric slide,” nearly Dwight Yoakam in tone. “I came up with the guitar riff first, then the first few lines, and when I came up with the final line of the first verse (“Dawn moved on to the next world just to get away”), I realized I was writing a song about the devil as a line dancer. Satan the ladykiller. That’s no strange territory for a country song, so I just let the rest flow.”

In between the heavy flowing cracks of red dirt and the neon’s gleam, Bostick considers what masculinity means in today’s world, too, allowing his lyrics to permeate and slice open the conversation. There’s a desperation marring his voice, brutal but perceptive. Even within the past 20 years, the definitions of “toxic masculinity” and “male gaze” have transformed, which led to the South Carolina native to become absorbed in what, exactly, that means now. “I think it’s a fascinating time to be a man. The traditional male sphere has all but dissolved into the stream of time,” he says, citing the fluid, uncertain nature of manhood on its very surface. “Men occupy so many differing roles in professional and family life that there is no way to say what is typical. The same goes for women, but, for obvious reasons, I have less insight into the female perspective.”

“I wanted to understand why some people could believe, in 2018, that half of humanity was bad upon being born, and why some men might play directly into the hands of such thinkers. I’ll stop rambling. I simply think masculinity, as such, is more interesting than ever in the age of infinite genders,” he stresses.

Inside Hellfire, he dabbles in masculinity’s various definitions, entrenched from his birth through his youth when society dictated men live, act, feel and love a particular way. In press materials of the record, he spoke about how previous generations were led to believe that “the big strong man…works physical labor and provides for his family and retires with a union pension,” a now-archaic notion, on all fronts. He expounds on this idea, as it relates to the album’s many threads, “In my family, I’m one generation removed from the physical laborer generation. My grandfathers were rural farmers and mechanics who served in the military, but my dad was a small-town doctor who later became a college professor and medical researcher. My dad definitely instilled the importance of being physically fit, strong, responsible and of high moral character, but he has been nothing but supportive of my choice to make my living as a musician. He was probably nervous when I was skinny and eating ramen seven days a week, but I think he’s resting easier now.”

Below, Bostick digs further into the album’s mood and discusses line dancing, how humans cope, misery and what he’s fighting against.

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