The world of Brooklyn four-piece Beeer is governed by stories of aging pets, nervous love, and old-fashioned mischief. Led by Ben Biber, the band’s debut album, “Dynamite”, braids strands of country, folk, and rock into eight brilliant songs traversing the raucous, the restrained, and all else in-between.
Interview by Teddy Urban.
When did you start playing music? Any early formative projects or bands?
I played piano as a kid. I took lessons from a wonderful teacher for a while, but
I never had the discipline to be great. I had a nice ear, though, and I was a great noodler, as much
as it’s possible to excel at a bad habit. Can you excel at picking your nose? I was a big show-off.
My favorite was the thing where you sit backwards under the piano and cross your hands, that was
always a hit at birthday parties.
In fourth grade, I had a band with my neighbor Logan. Logan was a little casanova with a Bieber cut.
He didn’t play an instrument, but he was supposed to be getting an electric guitar for Christmas.
He said he was a great singer, too, although he was holding off on showing me, on account of not
wanting to wear his voice out before our first tour. We wrote one song, called “You’ll Never Understand
These Things I’ve Done”–I wrote the chords, Logan wrote the lyrics. But then something happened, I don’t
remember what. I think Modern Warfare 2 came out, either that or he got caught with a nudie mag. And we
forgot all about the band, and I never found out what those things he’d done were.
I probably would have joined another band eventually, but when I was fourteen, I was visited by some
sort of malignant spirit that really messed me up for a decade. I was at a regional piano competition.
I was supposed to play “Ronda Alla Turca” by Mozart, not really a difficult piece. But as soon as I
raised my hands, I froze. I totally froze, I couldn’t play a note. It was like being in a dream where
you can’t run. I eventually forced my hands to move, and stumbled through the first few bars of it,
so bad it was almost vulgar, almost insulting, until the judge told me it was okay, I could be done,
my competence had been measured. From that day on, I couldn’t trust my hands at all. I had to quit playing baseball,
a sport I’d played forever, because I discovered at tryouts that I could no longer throw a baseball,
my throws cut dangerously across the gym. It wasn’t until a few years ago that I was able to trust my
hands enough to perform again. The problem is that I developed all my performance habits when I was
like six, and never updated them. So it’s a lot of jumping around, running around in circles like a dog,
lots of hooting and hollering, very undignified.
So it’s my understanding that many of the songs predate the formation of the band itself. What was the impetus for the start of Beeer?
I’ve been writing and recording music for most of my life. The problem is my ambitions
and my interests have always outpaced my talents and my discipline. I’ve always wanted to start a noise
rock band, for example, but I’ve never figured out how to get a good tone. Pedals frustrate me, amplifiers
mystify me. I spent a few years trying to record the heating vents at my dad’s house but I was never happy
with the results. I blamed myself but in retrospect I think it was the HVAC system–it was too simple, not
enough complexity of overtones. The house was built in the 60s or the 70s, which were very bad years for
HVAC, I’ve been told.
I’m able to get by playing keyboards in this tight post-punk band,
Imperial Motors,
just because the other
guys are all excellent musicians, and they provide enough structure for me to mash buttons and run around.
But I always liked writing and arranging, and it wasn’t until I started getting more into country-ish music
that I really settled into a groove where I felt comfortable doing my own thing by leaning into simple songs,
inhabiting a certain kind of character. What helped the most was finding the right people for the band–Teddy
(guitarist) and Abbie(bassist) and Kody(drummer)–who just seemed to get it.
Your live shows have featured as many as seven members on stage. Do you see yourself experimenting more with expansive live arrangements in the future?
Absolutely not! I’m a horrible manager of funds and schedules and just about everything,
especially people. Just getting four people, let alone seven, in a room together at a time is an ordeal,
let alone a whole chamber orchestra.
The first year of Beeer I wanted to spend throwing stuff at the wall to see what stuck, very “move fast
and break stuff,” often literally. So for the first few shows, I asked a couple pals to jump in, so we
had harmonica, fiddle, and piano on top of the two guitars. I loved the lush sound, so I decided to flesh
out the album more. And then I got a little too deep, and spent too much time locked in my room by myself,
overproducing stuff. So on one hand, it helped push the sound forward. But it also came out of a lack of
confidence in the songs and my performance. So in the future I want to think a little more stripped back,
more harmonies, finding energy without necessarily screaming my head off, more control. But who knows.
Whose voice is that at the end of “Junebugs”?
That’s my dad. He’s from Pittsburgh, which is such an interesting accent because it feels
to me like you can hear both Appalachia and East Coast in there. And it’s weird because he grew up only
like thirty minutes outside of the city, but it’s still pretty rural, a lot of it was farmland until
pretty recently.
I like to think of myself as a synthesis of two distinct Middle American sensibilities. My mom’s family
is pretty musically talented. My mom herself has a really lovely voice, and she just joined a choir after
decades out of the game, and I’m really proud of her. And her whole family is like that, they’re very
skilled and measured. On the other hand, my dad’s family is, as a general rule, tone-deaf. But they
also have a really unvarnished love for music, they’re much looser. My dad used to make me go with him
to ride our bikes to Ashley’s, the local bar and grill, where they had a bar in the backyard, and we’d
sit sit in the parking lot on the median and listen to the band play Mustang Sally, even though they had the
backyard fenced in with that black fabric, so we couldn’t see anything or even hear all that well. So this
album is very much a love letter to him, to that lack of self-consciousness. Beeer 2 will be about my mom,
probably, I’m not sure how. Maybe we’ll do more Sound of Music covers.
You told me that you had to change some explicit lyrics in the bridge on the recording for “Junebugs” so that your grandmother could listen to it. What did she think of the song?
Well, she listened, and she was very nice about it. “I just didn’t understand it at all,”
she told me, the last time I saw her. “But you have to understand. We remember when the Beatles came out,
and we thought they were crazy. We hated the Beatles.”
And that actually meant a lot to me. Especially for Nana, who’s not living in the past at all. She’s
still incredibly active, she’s a vibrant and vivacious person, and she’s never been scared of the present.
I mean, she’s not learning to DJ or anything, but she travels, keeps up with the news. But it’s more subtle
than that, even–it’s something you pick up on speaking to her, it’s an openness to both the past and the
future. I feel a little like living in the past is understanding without being understood, and living in
the “future” is the opposite, but I think that’s a little too pat, and therefore totally wrong. So forget
about it.
Do you have any personal connections to dog food factories?
In my dad’s hometown there used to be a Joy dog food factory; it stank up the whole town. A while ago they retrofitted it into a brewery, replete with pinball machines and food trucks. Whatever. Regarding the song, it’s just mock Springsteen schlock– ”baby, one day I’m gonna quit my shift at the dog food factory, and we're gonna get the hell out of this town.” That was kind of the whole idea with the record, how to approach a form as contradictory as “country music,” if that’s what this is. It’s freeing and constricting, it’s sincere and insincere. I wanted to access what feels true about the genre, or at least what’s meaningful, and what that always felt like to me was sadness. So I wanted to be able to express sadness as such, to be totally sentimental, without being stupid, pandering, whatever. So, okay, let’s recognize we’re writing a country song about being sad, that’s a pretty silly thing to do. Now let’s just run with it, and try to contain all those truths without winking. I think we did okay. B-minus, maybe. Beeer 2 will be much sadder, basically an emo record. We did a show with some emo bands and they were really supportive, so that's a sign. Beeer is an emo band!
Your short film, “21st Century Dodo”, featuring a down-on-his-luck humanoid dodo bird, feels very much like a Beeer song come to life. Are there plans to expand on the universe set out in this film, or other Beeer-related videos on the horizon?
There will definitely be some sort of Beeer video stuff down the road. I love video,
and I love the idea of film (and theater) as a kind of magic, a kind of possession. By making someone
read your lines, follow your directions, through instructions/signs, you’re kind of possessing them. It
almost feels like a God complex, but not in a way that feels shitty: not an Abrahamic god with absolute
control, but in a Greek God kind of way, where they’re all tricking each other.
And, sure, there’s a certain kind of guy who will make a lot of fuss about the inherent incompatibility
of film and theater, once he starts quoting Bresson you know you’re in for it. And it’s true, that idea
of the truth of film being different than the truth of literature, the truth of music, and so on. And so,
yes, a film can’t just be photographed theater. But these borders are porous, and that’s still kind of the
appeal, that potential for that demonic possession, I guess.
But like I’ve said, whenever it comes to logistics, I’m whatever the opposite of a savant is, so I have to
keep it stripped down, point and shoot, guerilla style. It has to be sloppy, but that demands a really more
motivated approach, where sloppiness is the technique, almost. But keep your eyes peeled! And the dodo: yes,
he will have his day.
You often feature photos of dogs on the band’s Instagram stories. Where are these dogs coming from? Are they involved in the band?
I’ve been working as a dog walker for almost five years now. I spend more time with dogs
than people, certainly. I’d like to think I’ve gained some deep insight into canine psychology, but I’ve
only really understood the ways that I’m more similar to them. Like, yes, I do want to go for a walk!
Yes, I do want to run around in a circle!
However, I will say that the dogs are not involved in the band at all. Dogs don’t understand rock and roll,
it’s not for them, and that’s okay. Just like I don’t understand licking my ass and eating chicken bones
off the ground. There will never be a dog at a Beeer show. Get ‘em out of there!
What’s on the horizon for Beeer?
Beeer 2, of course.
