Ben Seretan

The US copies of Bowl of Plums are very beautiful.

Impeccable design work by Alex Tatusian.

Rad show coming up next month! Celebrating the two year anniversary of A Song a Day.

I put out a record last week and since then I’ve been getting a lot of questions from friends + family about how it all works financially. Lotta confusion, and rightfully so - it’s a very complicated time out there for musicians and listeners. People seem very unsure of where their money is going, so I thought I might write a quick guide on “best practices.”

This is my particular situation laid out - it’s different for everyone, ugh - but hopefully it’ll shed some light on other musicians you like, too.

What’s the “best” way to buy an album?

BUYING SOMETHING AT A SHOW:

This is ideal - - no money taken out of the transaction, we can be face-to-face, no post office involved, and plus, you’ve come to a show that I’m playing! You’ve contributed your human presence to the quixotic efforts of getting people out to a show. Maybe you even helped get the show set up, which is tremendous. Hitting up the merch table and buying something is a great, great way to help out.

On the topic of going to a show, I’d like to say that you can really help the vibe out by watching the other bands, talking to people, tipping the bartenders well, and telling the people that run the venue that you’re having a fun time. Showing up for the opener and being a positive force goes a long, long way. (I’d like to write more on that in the future, actually).

BANDCAMP:

Bandcamp rules. I love it - been using it happily since 2009. It’s a great way to buy something directly from a musician - there’s a good chance that your purchase will go directly into the musician’s PayPal account. It’s also designed really well and allows you to choose what kinda file you want (FLAC, if you want!). Users are also encouraged to write little blurbs about the records they buy, blurbs that are public and display on the album’s page - I think those are really powerful. Most of all, it seems pretty FUN which I think is important.

Although it hasn’t always, the service does in fact take a cut. 15% of your purchase goes to Bandcamp, and another percentage goes to PayPal. So, say you buy a digital album for 7 dollars - the artist gets like...5 dollars net from that.

Personally, those percentages don’t bother me at all - it’s a great platform that gives me a lot of control + personal interaction with purchasers. Plus, Bandcamp provides the best way to download something for free that I know of - that service is offered free (up to a certain number of downloads).

Streaming on Bandcamp and its app is also very convenient + well designed. However! Unlike other streaming services, Bandcamp does not pay per stream. So - Bandcamp is great for buying, a little less ideal for just listening - by just streaming on Bandcamp, you’re not necessarily putting money in the artists pocket.

OTHER STREAMING SERVICES:

There are a few ways to get albums into various digital marketplaces and streaming services. I use a service called TuneCore that, so far, has been pretty great to work with - I send them my album + info + release date and they send it to all the streaming services. I pay an annual fee per record and any revenue from streams, downloads, etc. get collected and deposited monthly.

Spotify et al are really not that helpful. The payouts are pretty lame / inconsequential. They are actual, though, and for the last two years, my streams have actually been profitable (not in any huge way, but surprisingly substantial).

I personally use Spotify all the time as a listener, though, so I can’t really cast stones. Also - I think Spotify streams might be good for helping other people find out about an artist you like. So it’s not the worst thing in the world.

iTUNES:

I’m not positive at all how it works for other people, but I’ve had good experiences with iTunes - per my agreement with TuneCore I get most if not all of the money from iTunes sales, which essentially means that if you buy my album on iTunes I’ll get 9.99 about a month from when you buy it.

That money will probably stay in my TuneCore account and will be used to renew the digital distribution for another year. It’s only about 50 bucks per year, so one purchase is pretty helpful in keeping things online!

NON-$$$$$ SUPPORT:

Making money (well, more like recouping losses) is great, of course. But if you can’t or are unwilling to spend your own money to support an artist you like, there are myriad ways to help out without buying something. Sharing stuff on social media is extremely helpful, for instance. Or just following + interacting with on social media! Playing a song or an album for some friends of yours, like in the car or something, great. If you’re particularly touched, reach out via email or send a private message saying you appreciated something - that’s one of my greatest joys in life. I think just reminding the artist that you’re around goes a long, long way.

ARTISTS AND LABELS:

Most people you’ve heard of are on some kind of record label, an organization of at least one person that helps release music. Record labels come in all shapes and sizes - sometimes it’s one person doing things in their spare time, sometimes it’s a subsidiary of a big media conglomerate, sometimes it’s a small group of people working really hard to make the label their living.

Label agreements also vary wildly - sometimes it’s kind of just for show, sometimes there is a lot of money involved.

Generally, when someone purchases something from a label, the artist receives a small portion of the proceeds. They might not receive any payment at all if the label, for instance, needs to recoup the cost of pressing records.

Now, this might seem bad for the artist but, keep in mind, that buying things from small labels that take risks on musicians is supportive in its own way - it makes the artist seem like a good investment, helps keep infrastructure in place and, theoretically, helps the label expand (which in turn provides more resources to the artist). A label is in-and-of-itself supporting the musician, so you can help prop them up by proxy.

For better or for worse, labels are “brands” that maintain social media presences - following and engaging with those accounts is another rad way to provide a lil support without much $$$ involved.

RECORD STORES:

Guerilla performance video filmed in the Torino train station earlier this year :):)

Filmed by Stefano Scarafina, Andrea Pomini, and Jacopo Beta.

Bowl of Plums, the new album by Ben Seretan, is out digitally June 24th.

The first single - “You Took My Blues Away” - premiered on YVYNYL. Destination: Universe! - a studio in Portland, OR - released a digital 7″ of two additional songs from the record, one of which was premiered on XRAY FM. The video for “Cottonwood Tree” premiered on Tiny Mix Tapes. Also - Newsweek is looking forward to it.

Tapes by Hope for the Tape Deck, Euro edition vinyl by Love Boat Records & Buttons, US edition vinyl by Whatever’s Clever.

Big release show at Shea Stadium June 24th.

What follows is an interview that Ben conducted with himself about the record...

Hi, you can take a seat right here. There’s coffee and this is sparkling water. Comfortable? Good. I’ve got the tape running. Okay, so - first off - what’s with the plums?

It’s pretty simple, actually.

I have this memory of walking into my friend’s kitchen in the late afternoon - when the light is golden and kind of slanty - and seeing 5 or so plums in a fruit bowl on the wooden kitchen table and just kind of realizing all at once that they were delicious and full of juice, that they contained the promise of another plum tree, that a house with golden sunlight and fruit in a bowl on the table is full of love, that the plums were made of skin and flesh and that they, too, wouldn’t last forever. Just seeing all of it at once.

It was one of those tiny little moments that seem to happen constantly - - a moment that contains many, many other moments, a dizzying set of allusions and possibilities all contained by and sprung forth from a single image. It was a moment of terrifying liberty, an instance of truly recognizing the awe-struck bounty of being alive with a beating heart.

Also - - I’m still kind of bad at talking about this but - I have often felt like a big burlap bag of fruit - too ripe, ungainly, and heavy. Clumsy. Grace does not come naturally to me, nor does feeling good about my appearance and my body. In the bowl, the plums find form and shape and elegance. I strive for and celebrate this accomplishment.

Also - - to me the songs are kind of like plums, meaning that they’re the same type of contained thing, but really they’re grouped together and touching skin-to-skin.

Also - - the people in my life and who got their hands dirty in making and inspiring this record are similarly made of flesh and skin and are beautiful and full of possibility.

Ah, so - the ungainly body thing. Is that why in the video for “Cottonwood Tree...?”

Yes, precisely. I wanted to wiggle and jiggle and writhe around in a way I haven’t really let myself before. Put it all out there. As I keep saying in regards to that video - - EVEN IF YOU HAVE A WEIRD BODY YOU CAN BE FREE.

You can watch that here, by the way.

Great, that’s all very helpful. Thank you.

Personal developments, personal history - - has anything notable from your bio influenced this record?

Well, very shortly after my last album came out I fell in love very, very hard, an experience that has taught me a lot a lot a lot. I found places to play and wonderful people to hang out with in Italy. I went to the beach a lot. I moved to a much quieter and much more beautiful neighborhood, although I was briefly homeless because of bedbugs, all while I was trying to finish this album. Got a couple of new tattoos. I visited a bunch of the sets from Twin Peaks. My brother and sister-in-law had a beautiful little baby girl. I got older, shaved my head a few times. I played music at my friend’s wedding.

What about comparing this record to your last few releases? What can we expect to be different?

Still songs that are sung and usually played with a guitar. Two songs featuring a baby grand piano. Less jamming, but one very satisfying guitar solo up top. Tighter songs. Toe tappers. Some really juicy vocal harmonies throughout. A more “classic” feel, perhaps. Lots and lots of slide guitar - the slide guitar kind of binds everything, like ribbon around a christmas present.

“Ben Seretan” was something like planting a flag, saying definitively that I’m here and that I’m alive. Baring my skin to the sun. “Yellow Roses” was a party, an enormous yacht mowing through a field of flowers, leaving a wake of fog machine smoke and beer cans as we chugged along. Or maybe it was like riding in a car through a car wash.

Bowl of Plums is a bowl of fruit, a refrigerator door full of postcards, the day after the party, a serene still life with dried flowers, a roll of film with pictures from last summer, a book of hymns to joy. Feeling okay. A greatest hits album.

A “greatest hits album?” Care to explain?

Greatest hits albums take a few of the best cuts here and there from over the years and lovingly package them in a new structure, revealing the hidden undercurrents and through-lines of a life.

Bowl of Plums is something of a patchwork album - a collection of individually completed pieces.

I wrote these songs all over the country at different points in the last four years - on broken down pianos on an island in Alaska, on my grandmother’s nylon string guitar from 1953, in my tiny, freezing bedroom at an art gallery in Queens while nursing a hangover...and I worked on the recordings all over, too - in upstate New York, Massachusetts, Philadelphia, Portland - with a huge cast of musicians and engineers. A lot of these songs were hammered out while touring Italy last summer. Some were recorded to analog tape, some were recorded in high-def digital formats, a lot of them are a mix of both. And so the songs all sound a little different, like they might have been taken from a whole career of albums. Each track seems to me to hint at a nonexistent record that might have been made in the last two years. These are the best of them, the shiniest plums. The greatest moments.

The first music I ever bought with my own money (from the Wherehouse Music in Santa Ana, CA) was the Violent Femme’s “Add It Up (1981 - 1993),” still one of my favorite albums. You hear the life of the band for those 12 years, you hear them grow and maybe start to hate each other, you hear rare glimpses of their material you maybe wouldn’t have heard otherwise. I had that record in mind while making Bowl of Plums.

I’m partial to Tom Petty’s greatest hits, personally.

Oh yes, that’s another good one.

I’ve noticed in the art and in the lyrics...even in the epigraph on the back of the LP...that there is a certain fascination with flowers and more generally plants. You’ve also referred to this record as a beginner’s guide to botany. I’m curious - why? Why name flowers?

The obsession with flowers and plants came naturally - they popped up in the songs which, as I’ve said, were written over the last four or so years. I wrote a song called “Kudzu,” in 2013 inspired by a dream I once had about gently being covered by the creeping southern vine. The next year, taken aback one afternoon by how beautiful the word “rhododendron” is to sing, I started naming flowers over a crazy swirl of piano. Later, remembering that a friend of mine once discovered hundreds of mushrooms sprouting from the floor of her Brooklyn apartment, I imagined the floorboards of a bland suburban home being torn asunder by a sudden torrential bloom of spring crocuses. I referenced that image in the title track.

As I began to gather the songs, I started seeing what this was all really about - - growth, bloom, and the inverse, aging, decay. Seasons, time passing, erupting in color and just heralding one’s alive-ness. I came across that Eileen Myles quote I put on the back which really clinched it all for me:

"I’m really all flowers inside and you can really have them I’ll name them for you." 

That’s like, exactly it.

My buddies Nico + Michele - - Nico is a frequent collaborator, Michele is a wonderful painter - - provided the photo of sunflowers we ended up using as the cover. It’s from a trip they took together to the geographic center of the United States, which is just another really lovely and fitting detail.

Would you mind rattling off some of the themes and images mentioned in this record?

Oh, just like machine-gun style?

Yes, precisely.

Oh, okay, sure, let’s see - the pain-killing sensation of gratitude welling up and warming up your blood, the time my friend Alex sent me a postcard from Alaska in the middle of the summer and describing the trees making it look like snow and talking about landing a plane on a glacier, feeling so happy that you start crying, talking to your friends on the phone, trying to sleep next to someone in a bed that’s clearly too small, saying I love you but, more than that, saying that I’m in love with you, plants, fruit, feeling determined and certain that you will walk out of a situation that is causing you distress, like calmly exiting a burning building, the iron-willed glee of a well-deserved hangover, vanquishing the goblins of bad vibes, there’s one straight-up country love song, of course flowers, arriving on your lover’s doorstep in the snow as a blizzard rains down on New York City and hearing just the right phrase to melt away decades of body anxiety, swimming, dreams I’ve had, taking a nap in the afternoon sun.

Track four is a continuation of a track from your last full-length album, I mean that it’s “part two.” Why re-record an old song?

The original recording - done in five minutes in my mom’s old condo - was a song about the swelling of one’s heart. On this recording - with two drum sets and Dave Lackner’s out-of-control gorgeous sax playing - you can actually hear the sound of a heart swelling. It’s a recording that very nearly embodies the sensation I was originally trying to sing about.

Are there any other details you’d like to add to our general understanding of this album?

I’d like to say that falling in love is still one of the greatest things you can do. I’d like to say also that falling in love is all about reflecting one another’s most golden potential back and forth. It’s about being kind, fully, to another and to one’s self. I hope that these songs help someone fall in love.

I’d like to say that all of the musicians I played with and all of the engineers I worked with did an extremely good job. I’d like to thank them for their participation.

I’d like to reiterate that even if you have a weird body you can be free.

I’d like to encourage you to have along conversations on the phone with your friends.

I’d like to mention that I stood in a field of sunflowers after an extremely long day of traveling last summer and it was one of the happiest moments of my life and it’s part of the reason I wanted sunflowers on the cover.

I’d like to say that the goal of finding ecstatic joy is still valid and noble.

I’d like to say that playing music lets me be free.

Uh, I think that’s it.

Thank you for your time.

Video for my new song “Cottonwood Tree,” filmed in one take in my backyard.