(Taken from Copper Press. Pen: Theodore Defosse)
In a 1970 interview with Jann Wenner, John Lennon said Dylan approached him once with a song, and asked whether he heard and liked the words. John said it didn't matter with a Dylan song, and that it's "just the sound is what counts. The overall thing. You just have to hear the way he says it." (Wenner, Lennon Remembers, p 148). For me, that is a perfect, and perfectly vague, description of a Kind of Like Spitting song.
A writer cannot adequately describe it- without using "kind of like" statements- unless you can capture that voice of Ben Barnett's onto print. If you do not place his phrases into sentences that have a flow and a falling beat which ascends, now and again, into some beautiful anguish, then the writer is basically just hoping that fawning words will win over the music fan.
In the year 2000, Kind of Like Spitting released two masterpieces, Old Moon in the Arms of the New on Hush Records, and One Hundred Dollar Room, which was dedicated to friend Curtis James Freitag and split-released by Ohev and GanaaRecordings.
Of these two records, "there were two pretty different guitar approaches for a lot of the stuff," Ben opined. On Old Moon..., I was way into the guitar work, for the most part, playing a supporting role to the vocals. That record has more stripped guitar stuff, in terms of a lot of songs that are based entirely on four chords, with a quirk here and there. I recorded it a lot the same way You Secretly Want Me Dead was recorded: Very on the spot, in terms of instrumentation. Chad, Rob and I didn't really have a game plan. Old Moon in the Arms of the New is really about what is being said, rather than "Whoa, listen to that guitar part...
"Whereas, with One Hundred Dollar Room, Brian (Grant) and I just spent a lot of time at my house. Just guitar and bass and practice amps, taking notes on things like how big of a guitar sound we would go for, and where to do edits and clipping, and, every now and then, making tapes of progressions, and working through more techy guitar work. See, I feel like One Hundred Dollar Room is more about the rock than the lyrics. It was really fun to get more metal about the overdub process, and to get as crazy with time signature as we could, without a lot of rehearsing with a drummer at the time."
While One Hundred Dollar Room may have less of a lyrical focus, it nonetheless introduces new elements into Ben's songwriting, such as the lyrical repetition found in the songs "Hook," "Hoax," and "Cater."
"Before my friend Curtis died in July, he used to come over and I'd be in my room playing guitar... One day he came by, and I was playing what I told him was 'the hook game,' where I wasn't really going for anything but the hookiest parts I could write. And then he and I would talk about progressions and how approach was so important to get your point across."
With this belief intact, "I just figured that I would try to have fun with that part and throw it here and there. It was fun, maybe not the most original little thing- I feel even that it was vastly underdeveloped- but I liked it and so did Brian at the time, and so it stayed. Now, in retrospect, I think that "B-Side Poetry," which was created from the same 'hook game' approach, "hurt the album on a whole rather than helped in terms of listenability."
Oddly enough, for me, "B-Side Poetry" was one of the reasons a listener pay one hundred dollars for that room. It helped show similarities I had never before noticed between Barnett and Billy Bragg, whose "Little Time Bomb" serves as a closer. "Little Time Bomb," said Ben, just "makes sense to me when I hear it, and around the time that we were doing One Hundred Dollar Room, I kind of felt like the album was a bunch of songs about that song. That "Little Time Bomb" is the real story, and One Hundred Dollar Room was just a bunch of sub plots."
Despite, or because of the seriousness in which Barnett also approaches his craft, you can tell his ever-evolving band has fun in the creation process. Even in one of his earlier songs, when Ben screams a situation's "just like suicide, in that you really don't wanna die," part of the intensity felt by the listener is the passion Ben has for music. Unlike other indie performers, who feel The Ramones gave every band the right to plug away at the same tune, the recordings of Kind of Like Spitting show Ben Barnett stretching, taking risks, gambling on covers and pop songs Belle and Sebastian might sing (as in the delicate "Boy Cries Wolf"). For a person regularly lumped among the emo camp, it is surprising how accessible his music can be to even a parents' ears.
More formidable comparisons, should one make them, seem to be with artists like Chris Bell (Big Star) and Pete Ham (Badfinger). As with those two tragic figures of rock and roll's past, Ben Barnett shows remarkable melodic skills, with an ability to make two lines of differing lengths ("To see your happiness is the truest gift/Like when you're on the phone with him and you bite your lip") connect together like lyrics from the Brill Building School of Pop. They come across as professional, with lots of polish, but also raw as a journal entry. And yes, he does keep a journal, noting it helps him "vent through things quite a bit," which is why "the content extracted from that (typically makes his songs) very plaintive and dark." Since his aesthetic has seemed perfect from Song One, the interest in his personal influences becomes particularly interesting. I was very curious if other similarly gifted artists like John Lennon or Neil Young gave some shape to his own vision.
"I never really got into them. Not that I haven't heard their stuff since I was two, and you can't really be alive and not be able to instantly hum at least ten Beatles melodies. I think the first time I saw Neil Young was on a video, that "This Note's For You" song. I remember not knowing any better and just thinking, this guy and Don Henley must have gone to rock school together or something. Then it was him and Pearl Jam... I don't know... Harvest Moon is cool. Oh God, is that awful?
"As far as genesis for musical philosophy goes, I would say that I think my biggest influences have been my friends and the people that I grew up with. I think my friend Jon turning me onto Prince when I was sixteen and way into Slayer and being like, 'It's OK to like this, you're not lame!' was a very big step in the right direction."
Another big step in the right direction, if one whose time might soon end, was the good fortune that Ben and his talents landed in Portland, Oregon, where "there are basements to play in and big houses for pretty cheap, if you look. Also, there are some really great people here" who have helped nurture a talent such as his. He cites people "like Jeff London, Eric Mast (Audio Dregs, Thumb Zine, Lips Like Air), Chad Crouch (artist, runs Hush Records), and Rob Jones (Jealous Butcher, Beltline, Million Monkeys Union Press)." Without having met such brilliant, talented and positive people, "I would have never gotten into music and done so much of it with a feeling that "what I'm doing is admirable, music is important, and I should put out records, because you should do what you love, and my friends will support me in that."
While admitting some "beef with the scene here and stuff (some really shitty people in bands that make it not very fun to write songs, and the total wasteland that is the recent club scene)," he and all who have loved his records are glad he's stuck it out in a place where "the air has no electricity," an area that mostly "just pisses on you under a blanket of grey for eight months."
Sadly, no life is always in forward progress, and when one tries to realize such a personal passion as K.O.L.S.' music with the help of friends, the whole business of record-making shows how steps in Ben's life have sometimes went southward, too.
"There have been a lot of people that have been involved in K.O.L.S., and personalities have been really varied. Some people were really not into having a band leader when they were in, so I tried to do what everyone agreed was the best way to pull a part together (although admittedly, and much to a few people's disliking, I always had the last call). The problem with that is that, sometimes, I just wouldn't really get into someone's idea, and I came off like a fascist. Others were like, 'Tell me what you want me to play,' and it was just me saying, 'Well, maybe you could do this...'" The problem with that is that I couldn't really communicate what I was looking for very well, so I always felt kind of naggy and rustrated. I don't think I should be 'in charge' of shit. It's my instinct to rush to that position, but I don't think I'm an easy guy to work with. I don't know. There's that balance that you look for, I guess. To be honest, not a lot of the people I have played with had it. P.J. has it, Mollie has it, Brian has it. These are the people that are really fucking smart players, tight strong, interesting players. Cool people, too.
"I would like to think that I could stay friends with everyone that I have played with but it hasn't really worked out that way. I really feel shitty about it too, but I can't really do anything about it when someone has their feelings hurt (sometimes me) and doesn't want to get past it. It's like breaking up with a lover and it going very badly. It's actually really fucked. I would say I'm on the outs with about a third of the kids that have been in the 'band.' I think that lost friends because of my band is the worst part of Kind of Like Spitting for me."
For all its downsides and pains, though, Ben is never once doubting an apparent mission to supply to record stores his perspectives on life, and love, and the beauty of a well-vented thought. Far from resting on past achievements, he aims "to approach things with a more deadpan vocal approach and more sonic arrangements. I really want to get away from my emo roots and move back to a more pop or metal place with songs. I don't know, really. Whatever happens, happens. There's no way to tell. There never has been and there never will be."
As for us fans anxiously awaiting a chance to see his band perform, he really hopes there is an "us," but seems a bit uncertain of his fanbase.
"I really like to play shows when people actually want you to play, but we're not really that popular, and, most likely, won't be. So we end up playing, and you can just tell that people daunt give a squirt for you or your whiny voice. I think touring a lot got to me and I really have needed some time off." He does like playing live, though, especially "when it's tight and you feel like your locked with your friends."
His friends are all around, and will follow him as his band makes a move to Polyvinyl, and as his music continues to prove that some lives, when examined in song, not only send forth shivers of recognition, but makes one dance like mad in a field, alone, "under a blanket of grey."