Alec Benjamin is gearing up to drop his debut album, These Two Windows (buy), on May 29th. The release is something fans have been waiting for, especially after the success of his 2018 mixtape, Narrated for You. But the 25-year-old performer jokes that he doesn’t exactly understand the hype, as things have been business as usual on his end.
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Benjamin describes his latest project as a continuation of what he’s always done throughout his career: to try and write the best songs that he can with lyrics that are honest and from his heart. “I think maybe there’s a little bit of an evolution in the things that I’m talking about and the production. But other than that, not much has changed,” he explains.
He does confess, however, that the last few years have definitely made him grow as a songwriter, at least in the pool of experiences he’s now able to reference. Since the release of his latest mixtape, he’s toured the globe, performed on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon and The Late Late Show with James Corden, lost a family member, and shared the stage with his favorite artist, John Mayer.
And these newfound sources of inspiration could not have come soon enough.
Benjamin notes that his typical songwriting process involves waking up and writing songs in his living room but says this latest batch was more of a challenge. “I was on the road and juggling a lot of other stuff,” he says. And he ran into a bout of writer’s block after discovering that he had largely used up his well of experiences. “I realized that at a certain point, you have to take a step away and live a little bit so that you have things to talk about,” he says.
Benjamin admits that putting together his first full length was a bit taxing. “I think it’s pressure that I put on myself, just wanting to make music that is going to go the distance. And sometimes I obsesses too much over it and I should just make things that make me happy,” he says. And the album format in general, he says, puts extra weight on an artist.
“I don’t really love the idea of the album actually,” he says. “I think it doesn’t serve the songwriter, or the artist, or the audience. I think it serves the industry.” He admits to finding it challenging to have to fit a period of his life into ten songs for which listeners will judge him. “It’s a marketing thing. It’s not how people write songs,” he explains. “My YouTube channel looks more like what it actually is for me as a songwriter. I just make music and some of it sucks and some of it’s okay,” he explains. He’d much rather be evaluated on the culmination of his life’s work, not one period of his life, as “that makes things quite difficult,” he reveals.
Benjamin pushed himself to write as much as he could for this album and his forthcoming release tackles some of these songwriting frustrations. “Oh My God,” for instance, was inspired by his hitting a point of overwhelm with the process. “I feel like it’s ironic. It’s like when I say I hate social media on Twitter. That’s what the song is,” he says, adding that all of a sudden, the outlet that he used to express his emotions and the one that he had enjoyed using the most, he didn’t like any more. “I don’t have another outlet. So the only way for me to talk about hating songwriting was to write a song about it. It’s the only thing I know how to do,” he reveals.
The same journey can be felt on “Mind is a Prison.” “For me, it’s not just the requirement of making sure that the melody is good or that the track is good or the groove fits. It’s a standard of does this song say the thing that I want to say? Are the lyrics good? Are they are different?” He admits that he often struggles with having a song with lyrics that he likes but finding that the melody doesn’t meet his approval, or vice versa. “It’s always a hard juggle for me,” he says.
Benjamin doesn’t know if he’s yet achieved his goal of reaching a level of songwriting where his lyrics stand on their own, like a poem, and the melody is equally as prolific. “But this project is my attempt to try to do that,” he says. In crafting his newest songs, he was “trying to get a little bit more insight. Instead of telling a story, I’m giving more of a look at how I feel about what’s happening around me. So it’s a little bit more personal, a little bit more me in it,” he explains.
Another struggle for Benjamin is balancing his own personal standards with the standards that others will have of his work. “Also there is this thing that I have of wanting to maintain my integrity while at the same time wanting to have songs that are commercially viable. That’s a very difficult balance to strike,” he explains.
Leading up to his debut full length, Benjamin recently released “Six Feet Apart,” a track that listeners have been finding relevant in a time of social isolation. It was inspired by him being upset about the mandated lack of human interaction. “And I met a girl online and was like, ‘What a bummer that I meet a cool person finally and now I can’t even see them,’” he says. “But it turns out, she didn’t like me anyways. So the theme of the song is she didn’t call me back,” he jokes, adding that it was cathartic to tackle the struggle that everyone is going through at the moment with having to be separated from one another.
But hardships aside, songwriting always gets him through. “When I have a really shitty day and something that I feel is beautiful comes out of it, it makes me feel okay about everything that’s happening,” says Benjamin. “It’s like, ‘well, at least I have this.” “If you didn’t have all the pressure, you wouldn’t have a diamond. Little gems come out of it and create a silver lining. And without art, there’s no silver lining.”
