What happens when the unstoppable force of our dreams meets the immovable object of reality? It’s unclear. But Ben de la Cour is hell-bent on trying to find out.
Ben de la Cour was raised in Brooklyn, where he was playing New York City dives with his brother a full decade before he could legally drink and listening to his parent’s diverse record collection – full of everything from Bob Dylan and The Everly Brothers to Lynyrd Skynyrd and Jimi Hendrix. While music has always been his thing, school wasn’t, and after getting kicked out of several high schools for various transgressions, de la Cour did his formative education a favor and dropped out to do the sensible thing – become a boxer. After five years of being a human punching bag, de la Cour went to Havana at the ripe old age of nineteen to train with members of the Cuban national before it eventually became clear to him that there are only so many blows to the head you can take, so he packed up and headed out with his brother in search of a different kind of hard knocks, reviving the metal band they formed so many years earlier. They lived in a van and toured around Europe, but all the while de la Cour was listening and taking notes from folk heroes like Townes Van Zandt, Warren Zevon, Jackson Browne and The Band. After an especially disastrous tour was cancelled when the bassist’s arm was broken in a drunken fight, de la Cour traded in the hesher life for a quieter and more introspective brand of songwriting, returning to the States with a head full of softer, bruised, but no less intense acoustic songs.