More about: Benjamin Francis Leftwich

Honouring the poetry that goes into songwriting, Close Reading is a series of intimate conversations about all the books, films and thoughts behind some of your favourite songs. Diving into the lyrics and picking apart the lines that make you want to sing along a little louder, Lucy Harbron is sitting down with some of the most exciting songwriters around to hold a magnifying glass up to the lyrical form.

After his 2011 debut Last Smoke Before The Snowstorm, Benjamin Francis Leftwich became one of the most beloved in the category of British boys with acoustic guitars and big feelings. Though getting started with heavily metaphorical tracks, his work has slowly become more and more autobiographical. Guided by a calling to write about major life events like the loss of his father and his recovery from addiction, his new album To Carry A Whale is a further shift into a brutally personal approach to songwriting. 

Naming names and tackling big introspective questions about religion, recovery and rebirth, Lucy and Benjamin talked about ripping pages from your diary in the name of art:

So diving into To Carry A Whale, what was the jumping off point for the record?

At the start of the pandemic I got asked if I wanted to meet Get Cape, Wear Cape, Fly. Obviously, everyone loves him, there’s lots of respect on his name so I thought okay cool. I’m quite sensitive with who I let in but we met up in London Fields and we really got on. At that point I only had maybe one new song and the title ‘To Carry A Whale’ which is an observation on living with something that’s heavy and needs carrying and caring for, but if I don’t acknowledge that I’m powerless over this thing it’s going to squash me. When me and Sam (Get Cape, Wear Cape, Fly) met we were speaking about White Ladder by David Gray which is a really tight 10 track album. I’d always liked the idea of doing that with a really neat theme where I knew exactly what it was about, and I wanted to write an album on what it’s like to be an addict in recovery 3 years in.

The day after we met, when he came to the studio and we wrote 'Oh My God Please', it became quickly clear he would be the person to co-captain the ship.

From your first album to now, your writing has become a lot less abstract and far more personal. Was that an active switch or did it just slowly change?

I think it’s something that’s just happened. When I was writing Last Smoke Before The Snowstorm I was just a 19-year-old emo kid sat in my room listening to Paramore and knowing nothing about the music industry or radio or any of these things that come in to effect the process. I think for me to try and write in that ambiguous, constantly metaphorical way as a 31-year-old would be dishonest purely because I’ve changed as a human being.

I feel like songwriting is a kind of audio will sometimes, I think if I leave the studio tonight and a meteor lands on my car will this last song be something I’d stand behind? So if I need to sing 'I’m sorry' or 'I love you' or' I’ve always felt like life was slipping through my fingers', then I’m just going to sing it and not hide. 

Maybe taking personal writing to the further degree, you use names in your song in quite a Cohen-esque 'So Long Marianne' way which I imagine a lot of other artists would chicken out of doing. Do you change names at all?

I’ve never changed a name, I don’t think I’ve ever thrown anyone under the bus. Often when I use a name like Amy in Elephant; “been a while since Amy's been about, elephant / I just left, without a word, what a joke”, the blame is on me so luckily It’s never got me into hot water. 

I like going in that deeply personal direction so I can never change a name. I guess some people have done it very successfully you know, ‘Hey There Delilah’, who knows if he ever knew her?

And I guess in 'Tired in Niagara' you name check yourself and turn on yourself a bit. It’s such an interesting way of songwriting where it’s so specific to you: it’s like it’s been ripped right from your diary.

Yeah I like songs that are really introspective and artists that are willing to check themselves in the creative processes in a really forward facing way. That song in particular was literally written when I was tired in Niagara after we’d just driven through Cleveland where I had a historical situation that weighed heavy on my heart, so I was sat in the van feeling sad and quiet. Me and my guitarist Ollie had bought some of those cheap nylon string guitars that you get for like £20 in Oxfam but they sound amazing. Then I was sat in my room honestly just wrote that song on the spot. I knocked on Ollie’s door to ask him to help me finish it and we recorded a demo and the version you hear on the album is the one we recorded in that hotel in Niagara. You can’t beat those kind of performances in a moment of surrender and truth, so to try and replicate it would be dishonest.

Having the same kind of cinematic, raw emotional feel, what was the process of writing 'Oh My God Please' as a key track for the album?

I fell really in love with country music in the past few years since touring in the states and I started writing this almost jokey country track, you know, about going out in my truck with a beer and a Bible in my hand. Then that first day me and Sam were in the studio I suggested doing something rogue and doing a country song. At the time all I had was the first verse and we kind of just stared the song down. 

For me it’s a song about when I’ve tried every form of self-reliance, self-help, all the books, all the doctors, all the therapists, all the magic pills and nothing is working when someone who’s been clean and sober 30 years comes along and says why don’t you ask a power greater than yourself? There’s a great Drake lyric that goes ‘I don’t know who’s protecting me but we hit it off’ and this song is about when I have nothing else to do but say “oh my god please”.

You said about starting the song off with country music where the formats are always quite neat and rounded off, but in this song and a lot off your others it ends abruptly mid-thought with no resolution. Is this something that happens more when you’re writing about personal stories that literally aren’t finished in your life?

I think you’re definitely onto something there. You know three years into recovery is not long so more will be revealed in this story. The final lyric of 'Oh My God Please'; ‘let me come back in one piece once more’, is because I keep walking away doing my own thing, putting my hands right on the wheel and driving into the side of the mountain so the song is kind of a reminder to me that I need to get out of the way of myself. 

As a writer myself I really relate to these abrupt finishes where you’ve got the idea for a brief time and when it’s gone its gone…

I always describe it as finishing you know you’re sat by the lake waiting patiently and then when you’ve got it it’s slipping out of your hands. 

I thought of 'Tired In Niagara' as the chapter that comes before 'Oh My God Please'. You said about wanting to keep the record really neat with a story so do you see the chapters as linear or have you shuffled them up?

I definitely see a story through it but you know my experiences aren’t perfect. I’m never going to be what people in recovery would consider spiritually fit 24 hours a day, I don’t know anyone who is. So the way I justified having 'Oh My God Please' before 'Tired In Niagara' on the album was like showing that even when I’ve asked for help in that state of surrender, I’m never going to be perfect or free from the bondage of self. What I really have is a daily reprieve contingent on the maintenance on my spiritual condition and I don’t do that perfectly, I fuck up a lot.

Benjamin Francis Leftwich recommends…

To read - Midnight’s Children by Salman Rushdie

For a really creatively inspiring, all rules thrown out the window way of writing and dreaming and fantasising about reality.

To Watch - Empire Of The Sun

It was the first film that ever made me fall in love with music at 6 years old.

More about: Benjamin Francis Leftwich