…a war in my head, BEN OSBORN The Fire

Ben Osborn The Fire is available on Bandcamp, Spotify, Nonostar Records.

by Walter Price

It’s absolutely impossible to determine what stage of this brand new world we’re in at this very moment. But even more confusing and mentally terrorizing was the beginning of it all less than two years ago. Anxieties, uncertainties, and that poisonous cocktail feelings of hopelessness and eagerness all took their toll. And the somber two-track release, ‘The Fire’, from poet-songwriter Ben Osborn, is a stark and cinematic journey through this artist’s memories.

The A-side, “The Fire”, is an atmospheric track with shadowy harmonies as it remembers what the start of this felt like for this writer. Taken from the music video’s YouTube description, “The Fire draws inspiration from the feeling of dread and apocalypse that the beginning of the pandemic triggered in many of us.”

---

two hundred miles from your motion
I’m tracing the shape that you left
I made a map of the ocean
the circle we’d drawn with ourself
but how could I sleep at such distance
all of my dreams are on fire
I scribble out the equations
into the small hours
there’s a disease on my street now
there is a war in my head
a gap in the sky
for the rain or the light
to get through
and a fire in my bed…

---

The B-side, “Jane Today”, is a wordless, sorrowful song that’s both beautiful and affecting. The thoughts of the piano being played in the corner of a dark room as the notes drift through emptiness will send prickly tingles through the listener’s soul. In a quote borrowed from the song’s Bandcamp posting, “Jane Today is a deeply emotional and melancholic piano piece, written in homage to a family member. A reflection on illness and dementia,”.

Osborn is a cerebral and more often than not an autobiographical songwriter and he doesn’t stray too far from his roots on these two tracks. His intentions always seem to want you to feel what he was feeling when crafting his songs and the emotions aren’t always pretty, but neither is reality. And his truths are what you’ll experience with these two songs.

BEN OSBORN The Fire

facebook // website // instagram

“True to his love of poetry, Ben Osborn has a way with words and sounds, bringing us on a journey through the four elements at times reminiscent of Nick Drake. Despite the feeling of fear and anxiety caused by the climate disaster that seems ahead of us, what truly transpires from The Fire is a sense of hope, and a desire to keep dreaming and striving for a better world. This is a true love song, a song about how love can help us pull through hardships and bridge the distances we face.” – bio

support great artists, buy music