EXTREME LOVER Benji Hughes
Oct 24, 2008
The Tarheel singer-songwriter has had enough of silly love songs.
BY JOHN SCHACHT
Charlotte, North Carolina, native Benji Hughes describes himself as an "extreme songwriter," and there's little about his debut to argue the point. How many opening salvos are sprawling double discs of 25 playful-but-poignant love songs and carry a loaded title like A Love Extreme?
"Maybe this is as close to [John Coltrane's] A Love Supreme as a guy like me can get," laughs Hughes, whose thatch of red hair and fulsome beard suggest he could be a descendent of extreme Norseman Eric the Red.
A June tour of the U.S. with Rilo Kiley followed by a European trek in October as Jenny Lewis' opening act may have increased Hughes' profile some, but to most he remains a newcomer. Yet the 33 year old is actually a veteran of the music business, having penned his first song in his mid-teens and, except for occasional house-painting stints, shown enough songwriting talent that he's done little else for a living since.
Legendary record exec Seymour Stein signed him (along with Muscadine co-founder Jonathan Wilson) to a contract with Sire in the mid-90s, and it was Twin/Tone founder Peter Jesperson who helped land him at New West Records in 2005. In between, the then-bicoastal Hughes signed with an L.A. song-publishing company, and wrote with the likes of Alice Cooper, Burt Bacharach, Holly Palmer, Bill Bottrell, Chris Body and even rapper Mickey Avalon. (Other credits: The "put a little Captain in ya" Captain Morgan Rum ad jingle, and "Let's Duet" from Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story).
The key connection he made, however, was with former Everlast beats-maker/keyboardist Keefus Ciancia. Thrown together in 2004 to come up with a song for a birth control product advertisement, the two turned out to be an unlikely musical peanut butter-and-chocolate tandem, Ciancia's processed beats bringing out the playful side of Hughes' often moving love songs.
"I've got the whole rest of my life to make bummer records, and I'm sure that I will," says Hughes. "I love that kind of stuff, I mean I love country music, but I really wanted to make a record that was fun to listen to and overall more upbeat."
[To read a review of Hughes' album go HERE.]
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