I relased an album in 1996 and my second in 2026.
I learned to play guitar at 16 wrote my own songs immediately. Pages and pages of lyrics in Wordperfect files. Riffs stolen, invented, and butchered. The summer of ’96 I dragged my Dad’s Guild Dreadnought up to the loft in the Penza garage. Mark set it up for me with two mics and I cranked out 10 songs. Most were probably the first take. I made a bunch of cassettes. The album art was my driver’s license containing my full home address and birthday. A fortune cookie message covered up the driver’s license number: “Your luck has completely changed today” and I guess that was the name of the album. I included my phone number without an area code, because who would bother calling me long distance?
The songs are dreadful but pieces have hung around and still might show up in the future. I wanted to sound serious and be taken seriously. I can’t connect with this teenage Ben, even when I hear his cleverness. But man! I wish I had more of this guy’s writing, words, thoughts. I’ve been writing this blog since 2002 and it’s a lot of facts but few really deep thoughts as Tori Amos would say. What’s amazing now is I can’t remember them.
I don’t think I liked Your Luck Has Completely Changed Today when I recorded it. I just wanted to Have An Album™️.
30 years later I released my second album: RSTLNE and I fucking love it. It exists because I took a class over the summer filling in the gaps for me on home recording and the modern DAW (Digital Audio Workstation). Philip Weinrobe taught it from School of Song and if he ever teaches this class again I won’t shut up about it until you sign up. So Phil, don’t get mad at me for spoiling it.
He said to make a record you have to be different people.
The producer – Creates a vision and process for capturing the best performance. The best recording is not a crystal clear perfect take. It’s one that evokes an emotional response from the listener.
The engineer – Takes care of the technical requirements. Mic placement, cable management, DAW setup, level setting, tuning, etc. Only tests the setup for basic levels. No demos.
The performer – Change your clothes, leave the house for 2 hours, come back and show up like everyone was waiting on you. Be relaxed. Record your tracks, press stop, and close that laptop for a day. It’s someone else’s job to mix it.
I’ve tried to record for years, but every time it either sounded bad or it didn’t sound like me. The songs on RSTLNE don’t sound like a studio recording and they’re not supposed to. They sound like I’m playing a song for you in my bedroom. One of Phil’s rules was to never cut out a breath. If it’s in the mix you have to leave it because it reminds the listener there’s a human on the other end. RSTLNE starts with me clearing my throat.
Another breakthrough I found using Phil’s method was beat mapping. He wanted us to record without headphones which meant I couldn’t play along with a drum track and mix them together later. With beat mapping, I recorded without drums and later mapped each beat to whatever I was playing, even as my tempo shifted. There is probably a fancy plugin to do it automatically in Ableton, but I beat mapped every drum track by hand. The result feels organic.
Your Luck Has Completely Changed Today took a day of recording and maybe a couple other days of cropping tracks on a cassette recorder. RSTLNE‘s five songs took four months. Three songs I had written previously and the last two I wrote during the recording process.
You can listen to RSTLNE on https://bengarvey.com/music, bandcamp, or whatever streaming service you use. You can listen to Your Luck Has Completely Changed Today if we were friends in the 90s.
Thank you to everyone who wound up on a track here or there for RSTLNE: Carolyn Busa, Curt Reidy, Lisa Wise, and of course Sasha Garvey.
Keep an eye on my Instagram for any shows or appearences. I’m going to be the featured artist at the Fergie’s open mic on Monday, November 9th @ 9PM and I’ll be playing with Warren Miller, John Shaughnessy, and Carolyn.