I recently chatted with Ben Hozie, guitarist, lead singer, and co-songwriter of Brooklyn art-punks BODEGA (who play at Schuba’s in Chicago tomorrow night) while he strolled along Park Avenue in New York City after having left a classical guitar lesson. Our conversation covered everything from the band’s attitude toward performance to the Zen of airports.
7th Level Music: I’m really looking forward to the Schuba’s show.
Ben Hozie: Yeah, that should be good.
7LM: I’m also really looking forward to seeing (guitarist) Madison [Velding-Vandam] and (bassist) Heather [Elle] with The Wants (who, along with Chicago’s Jungle Green, will open the Schuba’s show).
BH: Their band is super cool, super fun.
7LM: The first couple tracks I’ve heard are really good.
BH: They’re a really fun live band, too. It almost becomes a techno show. They have these super hard edge grooves.
7LM: I’ve been listening to the [BODEGA] albums again and again building up to the show, and I keep thinking that Heather might be your band’s secret weapon.
BH (laughing): Yeah.
7LM: Her bass grooves, every time I hear them I think, “Damn, she is laying that down!” Everybody in the band is just killer. I know that you and Madison and (original drummer) Montana [Simone] and (co-lead singer, percussionist, keyboardist, art director) Nikki [Belfiglio] and Heather all met through the art and music scene there in New York City, isn’t that right?
BH: Yeah, we all had a bunch of different bands at the time who all knew each other. We were also doing different kinds of things, making films together. Like any creative world, everybody is doing a little bit of something.
7LM: Is that how you also met (new drummer) Tai [Lee]?
BH: No. I actually met Tai because Tai came to one of our shows. She was kind of into the band, and Tai’s a super smart person so we were talking about philosophy and hanging out. I asked, “What do you do?” and she said, “I’m in this show STOMP.” She was a drummer and dancer. I think she came to another BODEGA show and we realized she was wanting to do something away from STOMP and it just so happened that was when Montana was wanting to focus more on her fine art. She does sculpture and paintings. So that was a very easy transition. It was like, “Why don’t you just quit STOMP and be in our band?”
7LM: Speaking of philosophy, that’s one of the things I love about your music – your approach to radical honesty and impermanence and presence. I’ve been writing a book about impermanence and presence and I reference “Truth Is Not Punishment” in the book. That’s such a powerful tune.
BH: Thank you.
7LM: On the new album, Shiny New Model, one of the first lines is, “Ben, what’s the deal with all these ATM’s?” I couldn’t help but think that came out of a real conversation.
BH: Of course. For whatever reasons, I’ve been obsessed with ATM’s. In our band before BODEGA, Bodega Bay, we even had two songs called “ATM.” I make films, too (Pretorius Pictures), and in almost all my films I make sure to have shots of ATM’s, not only because I like the way they look but I think they’re a potent metaphor. Somebody eventually got around to asking and I thought, “Well, I gotta answer them.”
7LM: By the way, I watched Little Labyrinth. Nicely done.
BH: Oh wow! That’s great. Madison and Nikki are in that one.
7LM: It was really nice. Another thing that song reminded me of is that I’ve been reading all this stuff and kind of obsessed lately with this idea of “non-places” like airports and hotels where people don’t really reside in them, and I’ve been seeing all this information on how everything’s becoming the same. How every coffee shop has to look like a Brooklyn coffee shop now and how our phones make every place into the same place, and I love this love-hate relationship with technology that you approach in your songs.
BH: I kind of romanticize those places. It’s one of my favorite things about tours, hanging out in airports and motels. There’s something really dreamy about all the glass. It’s kind of awful in some sense, but I kind of enjoy it. There’s something very Zen about being in those places. It’s like, “Nothing is happening here except for a bunch of transitory moments.”
7LM: I also love the way that you and Nikki and everybody else incorporate so much art and sexuality into the songs and the performances. I think a lot of that’s missing from a lot of live bands right now.
BH: Yeah, especially in the indie rock world. We’re still too much into that 90’s thing where you just wear your work clothes onstage and it’s not cool to try hard. Not only is it not fun, but that’s a privileged position. If somebody’s paid money to see you, you’d better entertain them.
7LM: Yes. I read a quote from Benny Goodman not long ago that pretty much says the same thing. If you’re gonna get up there, you gotta bring it.
BH: The sexuality of it, that can mean a lot of different things. One of the things that’s gotten so boring about rock and roll is that it’s not sexy. Obviously, it became sexy in a really gross way. We all know what that means, but sex is an essential part of what rock and roll is. The idea of a liberated sexuality. That was one of Nikki’s main ideas when we started the group, “We have to be sexy, but in a new way.” Whatever that means. We’re always experimenting. That’s always a loaded word, but I think you can smell what I mean.
7LM: Speaking of your music and art, I saw the clip of the [Paris] fashion show with “Name Escape.” That was perfect. Seeing all these dudes who look exactly the same coming out during that song, I thought, “This is one of the coolest things I’ve ever seen.”
BH (laughing): I gotta tell ya, that was one of the most surreal moments of my life. Sitting with all these high-fashion people and to hear a song we recorded in our practice space being blasted in front of all these people and to feel like, “How are we here? What ripple in the Matrix did we accidentally blip into?”
7LM: Speaking of Paris and Europe and that part of the world, I listen to BBC 6 Radio a lot and “Jack in Titanic” was all over that station. They loved that track.
BH: Yeah, thank God for BBC 6. They made it so we can tour Europe now.
7LM: I can’t remember, have you toured Europe already?
BH: Yeah, five or six times now. We tour there more than we do America because, for whatever reason, we have way more fans over there now.
7LM: Have you discovered countries where you’re popular and you wonder, “How did you hear of us?”
BH: Yeah, France is like that and to a certain extent the Netherlands is like that. It all started with the BBC 6 thing. I also think that maybe since Europe’s smaller, information travels faster. We have a lot of support in pockets of America, but for however long it takes us to get to Minneapolis or Nashville, everywhere in-between has not a fucking clue.
7LM: Getting back to your film work, I loved “I Am Not a Cinephile,” and when I found out you were a film maker, I loved it even more.
BH: That song came from me hanging out with academic film people. That’s kind of my background. I studied film history and film theory and film philosophy in college, and I do genuinely love that stuff but I remember having a dinner with a couple older guys who were so obnoxious in their cinephilia in a way that was not even aware of the joys of cinema. I just left that dinner thinking, “If that’s what cinephila is, I don’t like it.” There’s a good documentary called Cinemania, have you heard of it?
7LM: I’ve heard of it somewhere.
BH: It came out ten or fifteen years ago. It’s about this group of people in New York who go to every single repertory screening every day in New York City and they’re still doing it right now. If you go into a lot of art houses of New York, you’ll still see these characters. They have such an OCD regarding cinema, they’ll be like, “Okay, there’s a [Jean-Luc] Godard playing at eleven at MOMA, but if I take a cab I can make it to the one-thirty [Stanley] Kubrick over in the Bronx, and okay, there’s a thirty-five millimeter John Ford print showing…” and I don’t know how these people can afford it because they clearly don’t work. They just sit in the movies all day. The movie really shows you how these people are just addicted to the screen in a weird way. They have incredible taste in movies, obviously, but it’s like, “Haven’t you seen them already?” It’s really bizarre. Godard is kind of a hero of mine, and there was a month where they were showing every single Godard film at Lincoln Center in New York, even the TV stuff and the stuff that’s not available online. I did what those people do. I was there for every screening, five a day. It was amazing, but I kept seeing all these people and I would be like, “What’s wrong with these people? Are they such losers that they have nothing else to do with their lives?” But then I realized, “Oh my God! I’m one of them!” It’s a complicated song.
7LM: Do you have any favorite misheard versions of your lyrics?
BH: Yeah, I do. There are some pretty funny ones, but the best one is our song “Name Escape,” and some guy thought it was “Name a State.” He thought I was saying, “Name a state,” and he was like, “Delaware! New Jersey!” “Name a state!” “Alaska! Hawaii!” I was like, “That is an insane interpretation.” It was pretty stupid, but it was amazing. That’s what he heard. He even bought the record. He kept hearing it that way. I was like, “Are you not listening to the rest of the song?”
7LM: I know the name of Bodega Bay came from The Birds, do you have any other favorite [Alfred] Hitchcock films?
BH: Yeah, my favorite Hitchcock is The 39 Steps. I like British Hitchcock, like peak British Hitchcock. It’s really witty and it has all the charm. That movie feels miraculous to me in a way because it still feels super modern and abstract like his stuff got, but it feels a little more like it was off the cuff in a way. It feels somehow more beautiful to me because it feels like he was in the act of self-discovery when making that one, whereas at the end when he was in masterpiece mode through the Fifties and early Sixties, he knew what he was doing at that point.
7LM: Have you seen 1917?
BH: No. Nikki saw that last night. She said, “Do you want to go?” and I was like, “You know what, I don’t wanna go see that.” I really don’t like war movies. I haven’t seen it yet, but to me it looks like a theme park ride. Maybe I should because I’m sure it will win movie awards.
7LM: I haven’t seen it either, but the big thing about it is that it’s one long continuous shot.
BH: Like [Hitchcock’s] Rope.
7LM: Yeah, as a result of that, Rope‘s been getting a lot more attention lately.
BH: It’s (1917) not actually, just like Rope isn’t actually [one long shot]. There are several movies that are actual long shots with no stitches together, like [Aleksandr Sokurov’s] Russian Ark had no splicing or no dolly into darkness and then pull out again. Have you seen the Bi Gan films like Kaili Blues or Long Day’s Journey into Night?
7LM: No, not yet.
BH: They also have this Hail Mary long take. It’s way cooler in Kaili, because it’s kind of like what I was saying about The 39 Steps, “How did you pull this off with this cheap technology?” He’ll get on the back of a car and he’ll ride a mile or two, and then the camera will get off the car and follow the character into a house, and then it’ll strap onto a motorcycle and this camera literally has travelled probably ten kilometers. It crosses a river even, and there are no cuts. It’s kind of a dumb movie in some ways, and it’s clearly a young person’s movie. No one would think to do that if they were a tasteful film maker, which is why it’s awesome.
7LM: Yeah, you’ve got to push the envelope. On the new EP (Shiny New Model), I noticed how some of the grooves were tighter. I don’t know if that was a conscious decision to experiment with different grooves or song structures or not.
BH: Yeah, we wanted to change it up a bit. Make stuff that was maybe a little bit more melodic, the production’s a little lush. One funny difference is there’s a kick drum on the record, whereas there isn’t on [BODEGA’s first record] Endless Scroll. I think having the sub-frequency adds to the feeling of grooviness. It’s still a kick drum on its side, but even just hitting a kick drum with a mallet on its side gives it that oomph. That was the first time we actually recorded in a studio with a classic console. The first record was just on a tape deck in a practice space.
7LM: I read that. I thought that was pretty damn cool.
BH: No matter what’s going to happen with technology, there’s nothing like a live group playing to tape. It’s still always going to sound good.
7LM: I absolutely agree with you. There’s some stuff that’s so overproduced that I sometimes think, “Why not just come to the studio and rock out?”
BH: Well, if the toys are there they’re going to get used. That’s the thing about technology. That’s why you can’t make something like an atom bomb and not use it.
7LM: Outside of music and film, what else are you fascinated with or interested in?
BH: I’m interested in all kinds of things. Philosophy’s my biggest passion, not as big as film and music, but maybe on the same level. Me and Tai have a little philosophy group that gets together once a week and talk about any kind of theory. I love history. I love gambling. I’m very into cards.
7LM: Who are some of your favorite philosophers?
BH: Right now in the group we’re reading [Gilles] Deleuze, who’s probably not one of my favorites actually, but it’s fun to read. I’ve really been into [Martin] Heidegger recently. In terms of classical philosophers, I love [Immanuel] Kant. That was my big guy when I was younger. So almost anytime I read something, I’m like, “Oh, what would Kant say about this?” That’s just where my brain goes. It’s not like I would necessarily recommend Kant to anybody. He’s a little bit of a bore if you don’t take him in his historical context properly. I’m a big fan of [Søren] Kierkegaard, even though I’m not a Christian. I think of veganism, that’s something I’m really passionate about, as being a thing like Kierkegaard’s faith in an irrational god. Even rock and roll is like this, you choose this mode of being, this principle that you have, and then you just will yourself toward it, even if you can’t really justify it to anybody else. All you have to do is justify it to yourself. I’ve always thought that was really beautiful.
7LM: That’s a perfect way to wrap this up. That’s beautiful.
Keep your mind open.
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[Thanks to Patrick Tilley for arranging my chat with Ben.]