The Third Eye

The Third Eye loves everything the indie label Perpetual Doom puts out, and it was no different with the new digital-only EP by BenBen and Lily Desmond. White Elephant is a six-track treat released in early June that showcases more of the riff-driven mystical folk rock the self-described “gnome rocker” BenBen has become known for over the past few years.

On White Elephant, BenBen is joined by Lily Desmond, a screaming violinist who always ensures everyone has a good time. Lily grew up in Los Angeles but has since migrated to the East Coast to immerse themselves in all kinds of music, including this recent collaboration with BenBen.

Building off the strength of last year’s impressive LP, Sincere Gifts, BenBen takes his lush arrangements up a notch on White Elephant, providing plenty of magical escapism for the summer. Judging by how the world- especially the U.S. – is going right now, we could all use a dose of escapism, right?

We should also note that BenBen and Lily are touring Europe and the U.K. this summer. So, if you’re around those parts, check out the tour dates on BenBen’s website here to catch some sparkle and pixie dust-rock to soothe your soul.

The Third Eye caught up with BenBen recently, and he was kind enough to answer our questions via email. Check out the interview with BenBen below, where he discusses his musical partnership with Lily Desmond, the duo’s new EP, and how his sound has evolved since his debut 2022 record.

Interview With BenBen

Third Eye: Thanks for doing this interview! Can you introduce yourself and Lily Desmond and tell us about your music? 

BenBen: It’s really our pleasure—Third Eye wrote probably the most in-depth review of the Sincere Gifts album, and it meant a lot. So, I’m BenBen. I’ve been releasing indie music since I was a teenager, but I took a long hiatus from 2014 until 2022 and have woken up in a strange musical landscape. Lily Desmond is a singer/songwriter whose darkly beautiful melodies stem from an uncanny imagination and intimate understanding of musical magic.

The music BenBen + Lily makes is fiercely magical, with a flavour that is more fantastical and literary than traditionally psychedelic, using instrumentation that merges rock, chamber music, and Celtic-influenced folk. We’ve been seeing the term Outsider Folk Rock used more frequently, which is a relief, and we think that’s probably the weird little box we can fit into best without breaking anything on the way in.

Third Eye: What’s the story behind how your musical partnership formed?

BenBen: My adventure with Lily feels quite like a fairytale – I’m not exactly Sleeping Beauty and she’s not exactly Prince Charming (and there has been a lot of magic singing but no magic kisses), but Lily really can take the credit for melting the frost around my musical heart. 

Making the Sincere Gifts album was horrendously brutal. I would have released it years ago if I hadn’t spent so long trying to make things work with a songwriting partner who had a gift for gaslighting. I was eventually able to work up the strength to walk away from that situation, but by the time that album got its second full mix and master, many of the wonderful people I worked on it with had understandably walked away. One of those was another magical singing violinist named Camellia Hartman, whose voice was a core part of the project. I went through this Goldilocks period, trying to find someone to fill her shoes.

What’s wild is that, just as I had finally accepted that I would never find that kind of character again, Instagram served me Lily’s profile. As soon as I heard her music, my heart was blown straight out of my chest. I had never heard anything like it, other than maybe my earliest demos. I knew instantaneously that we shared huge amounts of creative DNA, particularly as singers, but Lily had this recklessly daring edge to her writing that I had smoothed out long ago in my own music. We started talking online minutes after I found her stuff, and she felt a huge amount of resonance with my music. She invited me to perform an opening set for a big night in her career – she was debuting her amazing EP ‘Omen’ – and it was the second (and last) time I’ve performed totally solo in New York City. 

She came on board to perform the violin parts, and we wrote a song together with our friend Tiger Darrow, which will be released this fall. We planned a UK tour together. Literally two weeks before that tour, while the Sincere Gifts album was being pressed to vinyl, that old songwriting partner of mine came out of the woodwork and threw a huge, classic third-act suckerpunch at the album. The way I chose to respond to that was to just rip a bunch of material off the record and to very quickly re-write huge chunks of it.

Lily was right there with me, totally fired up by what was happening, and even though she had never seriously collaborated as a writer with anyone before working with me, we just instantaneously melded, becoming one burst of white light. Over the course of basically four days, we wrote and recorded three songs, re-tracked countless more, and submitted the work to the mastering engineer (the endlessly patient Piper Payne) and got the album re-uploaded to Tunecore, and back onto the vinyl presses, with barely a minute to spare before the release date. We flew with Tiger to the UK and proceeded to kick ass. 

We came back from that trip having really forged a relationship that feels like family. I have never been in a musical partnership with more trust, love, compatibility, and shared perspective. Most importantly, we have really open, clear, and skillful communication. I still wince a little when I think about all the time I’ve lost in music, but when I consider that it all led me to this partnership, it makes me so grateful. Walking this weird road hand-in-sweaty-hand with my owl sister Lily Desmond is the greatest joy of my career.

Third Eye: Can you expand on the meaning of the title? How does that link to the creation of this collaborative EP? 

BenBen: We were sitting in a pub in Edinburgh, reflecting on how insane the previous few weeks had been, and discussed trying to do a follow up to Sincere Gifts, both to celebrate our new co-writing abilities, as well as to formally move on from that traumatic era. We wanted a name that would acknowledge this kind of triumphant transition and settled on ‘White Elephant.’ The term comes from the circus world, referring to an exotic attraction so expensive to maintain that it can’t turn a profit, but also so beautiful that it’s impossible for the owner to abandon. 

Third Eye: The EP spans various styles and emotions, from the spell-binding opener ‘Leaky Ship’ to the rock-infused ‘Sunniest Sentiments’. Which track was the most challenging to create, and why? Conversely, which song do you feel best represents the essence of BenBen + Lily as a musical entity?

BenBen: This album was fully effortless, but certain songs were more fun than others to make. There’s a meta narrative on the ‘White Elephant EP,’ where Lily holds my hand while I let go of this phase of my career and watch it sink into the ocean, and continues to hold it while we gaze into the future and prepare to spin gold together. I literally had tears in my eyes when we finished writing/recording the final song on the album, ‘Sunniest Sediments.’ There’s this moment of release at the end of that song where we really bottled this transcendent feeling, the golden glow of our souls turning into firefly-like stardust and beginning to scatter into the unknown. I both have too many words and not enough to describe what I saw and felt in that moment, but it was captured in real-time. 

I don’t know if I’ll ever have another chance to shout out to the song ‘Ian Anderson’s Voice,’ which Lily had practically nothing to do with other than cringing at the overt lyrical reference to the genre of folk rock. I think that’s the only significant suggestion of Lily’s that I have not taken. But that song is both gorgeous as well as hilarious, and it was a joy to so baldly converse with the heritage of Jethro Tull. But it’s the least BenBen + Lily track, for sure.

Lily Desmond adds a unique dimension with her 5-string violin. Can you share how you integrated this instrument into the soundscapes, and how both the violin and her vocals have contributed to the overall atmosphere of White Elephant? 

She’s an incredibly skilled and unusual violinist. The most classically Lily-esque violin playing on this record is actually on ‘Tuba Joe,’ and you’d never know it was a violin. It sounds like a rusty car bumper being dragged across a gravel road by a vicious, vengeful ghost. 

To be fair to Lily, I probably ask her to pretty-up her violin more than I should. She’s got this incredible command, both as a singer and player, of celtic-influenced ornamentation, and I love that. I think Lily would agree that I ask her to explore a more overtly gorgeous and optimistic perspective. My music is rarely cynical, even when it’s submerged in bitterness. This is a deep dark well of an EP, at its core anyway. She’s helped me appreciate the darkness, and I’ve shown her how much light she can shine.

Third Eye: It’s really exciting to hear that you have an upcoming tour across the US and Europe. What can fans expect from your live performances, and how do you translate the sonic landscapes of White Elephant in your live shows? 

BenBen: Thanks! We’ve been loving these tours, and we hope to announce a west coast and northern and southern US tour soon. I’m hard-wired for touring and it’s been way too long since having the chance to do it so consistently.

We perform all this stuff in a stripped down way – either accompanied by a string quartet or as a fully stripped down trio where I’m on guitar/vocals/drum pedals, Lily is on her 5-string and vocals, and we have a guest on cello + vocals. On this upcoming tour, that guest is the incredible Manchester-based cello goddess Isabel “Izzy” Williamson. 

Honestly, our productions are envisioned for a giant stage, a real sound check, a small chamber orchestra, and a 1.5hr run time. I truly hope that we get a chance to present our music on that scale someday. 

But assuming that we won’t, the stripped down style is the next-best way and a quantum leap better than a small rock band. Losing the drums and bass hurts, but it leaves a ton of room for the vocals, for all the bizarre layers of melodies that Lily and I both pepper all of our material with, and working with bowed instruments and my chunky right-hand picked guitar still brings a ton of almost Metallica-like rock propulsion. 

I think I can say that audiences can expect at least a few moments where we open a portal for them to step through. We’re also very open and sweet people, and we appreciate our audiences quite a lot. We will probably end up writing songs influenced by something said by someone we meet on this tour, so come talk to us! 

Third Eye: How do you think your sound has evolved since your debut with Dima in 2022?

BenBen: ‘White Elephant’ is the first release I’ve been a part of to actually be put out chronologically. The Dima + BenBen EP, which I’m grateful to you for mentioning, was made in 2 hours at the end of a day I had booked at a studio in New York ‘finishing’ Sincere Gifts for the 2nd, but not final time. I was so amped up that Dima and I decided at the last second to just bust out a 3 track EP without a click track, playing the drums and guitar and singing live. It’s the first thing I released where I’m the only drummer and where there isn’t a click. It was mixed the next day. Getting that out there was Dima’s gift to me, knowing all I had been through. It was a beautiful way to formally start the BenBen journey. 

The ‘Algorithmia’ EP of 2022 is a bizarre banger that Dima also plays on, but it was finished ages ago. I’m sad more people haven’t heard that one. It’s got a more careless rock vibe than the rest of my catalogue, but still layered into infinity. There’s a song called Paul Verhoeven on there which I’m tickled to have been able to release.

In terms of sonic evolution, I have to acknowledge some criticism that I received years ago. The critic claimed that my albums were kind of interchangeable, and to be fair, yeah, there’s an aesthetic thing I’ve gone for since day one. My biggest creative influence is Stephen King – that guy has written something like 6k words per day since the 1970s. Other than Carrie, there’s a certain feeling and style that has been there from his second novel onward. His books are all so different, but he found his style early and just kept going with it. I think that I’m somewhat similar – I have an idiosyncratic voice and I’m prolific. 

There is actually a narrative throughline that actually starts with my band Arizona’s three albums worth of music, continues through my second band New Beard’s one LP, and then links starts with the ‘Be a Mermaid’ EP, carries through Sincere Gifts and ‘White Elephant’, and will crash upon the shore of an LP I’m putting out in 2025 called The Book Itself which is probably the wildest thing I’ve ever done and definitely the largest break from my historical sound. 

My hope is that the story will continue beyond that LP into another co-written world with Lily (who is releasing her own solo LP, Lace, soon), but I’m intentionally not allowing myself to do anything major until TBI is out. I am 100% done with having big stockpiles of music sitting in my bomb shelter. And I really, really want to be personally surprised by it.

Third Eye: Thanks so much for talking with me! 

BenBen: Really, thank you. Third Eye is one of scarcely more (and maybe less!) than a handful of outlets that still take the time to very deeply engage with music that is anything like the kind I make. Third Eye shines a light on artists who might not be on a directly ascendant path but whose creative seriousness you still clearly recognize and appreciate. You’re doing important work, and we’re really grateful to leave our sweaty pinky prints on the site!

Check out White Elephant by BenBen on Bandcamp here.

Check out BenBen’s official website here.

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