About That Song: Ben Cook-Feltz
About That Song #38
In our special series, singer-songwriter Sarah Morris interviews artists about the songs that shaped them.
Hi! I’m Sarah Morris. I’m wildly in love with songs and the people who write them. There have been a few songs in my life that have been total gamechangers—songs that made me want to be a songwriter and songs I’ve written that made me feel like I am a songwriter. About That Song is a space where I can learn more about those pivotal songs in other writers’ lives.
In the 38th edition of this series, I connected with the wonderful Ben Cook-Feltz, someone who’s had a big impact on my own songwriting journey! We talked about influential songs and artists as well as his own songwriting process and a couple of tracks from his most recent album.
Ben Cook-Feltz (selfie).
Sarah: Hi Ben Cook-Feltz!!
Ben: Hey there Sarah Morris!
Sarah: Thank you so much for coming over to About That Song. It’s always so good to get to talk to you about…anything, really, but for the purposes of our conversation here, music especially. You’ve been a deeply influential person in my own musical journey over the last decade, often as a collaborator but also as someone who’s generous with a “Hey! Have you heard this song? Go check it out!”—leading me to songs I’ve fallen in love with.
Recently, you released your eighth album—the fantastic Trucks—and for anyone reading this in the Twin Cities area, you have a full band show coming up at Aster Cafe. I’m wondering if you’d take a moment to share a few of the songs that have played a pivotal role in your journey. Do you remember the song that you heard that made you want to be a songwriter? Tell us about that song.
Ben: Oh sheesh … that’s a hard question to answer! (Great start, huh? Goodnight everyone!) I’ve been writing music since I was very small. I started teaching myself to play piano when I was 7, and almost from the start, as I was learning tunes from Nintendo games and Godzilla movies, I was writing instrumental music. The whole notion of creating was baked into my desire to learn how to play, like I was learning an instrument so I could write stuff for it. I still feel like I’m a songwriter first and a musician/singer second. There were definitely composers who influenced me from the get-go—Ray Lynch and Paul Winter most especially—but no specific song made me go “Aha!” At least not that I can remember.
I wrote piano pieces throughout my teens and didn’t start writing lyrics until much later. The first song that really made me pay attention to lyrics was Tracy Chapman’s “Mountains O’ Things.” I think I was 15, and I clearly remember listening to it and thinking, “Wow.” The song is about wealth and material possession, and in just a few verses, she manages to cover so many angles and perspectives, and she does it so sympathetically.
First she’s someone who has very little, who dreams of being wealthy and the freedom that provides. Then she’s the person with obscene wealth, and it’s awesome, but that freedom becomes a tool for greed and evil, and reveling in being the envy of everyone who has less than her. And then she talks about how people tell her she still has time to atone for that behavior, basically stop being Scrooge, and finally everything breaks down and she admits that she’s lonely, she knows she’s awful to good people, and her mountain of things has become a shield and a security blanket.
It’s just astounding. The instant I heard that song, I started paying attention to every lyric she ever wrote. And then I started paying attention to all of my other favorite songwriters—Paul Simon, Tom Petty, John Gorka, Joni Mitchell, etc.—listening to what they were actually saying, and how they went about saying it. How some songwriters were brutally honest or sardonic or poetic, how some seemed to revel in the economy of words, all of the possibilities songwriting presented. I fell in love with the possibility of it all, and knew it was only a matter of time before I’d work up the gumption to try it myself.
Sarah: I don’t know that song, and now I’m thrilled to get the chance to fall in love with it! Once you began writing, did you feel like a writer immediately? It took me a few years of writing before I believed it—was there a song that gave you that “a-HA! I AM a songwriter!” moment? Tell us about that song.
Ben: Oh man. I feel like I’m always this close to feeling like an actual writer. Lyrically, anyway. I said before that writing music started when I was small, but I didn’t start writing lyrics until I was 20, and because of that, I’ve always wrestled with impostor syndrome. Every album, there’s a point where I write something and I think “Okay cool, I’ve got this,” and then I go back and listen a year or so later and I’m like “Ope, wait, nevermind, next please.”
Sarah: It’s possible that the “Ope, wait, nevermind, next please” is part of being a songwriter, I think. Or at least, I wonder! I certainly know that this close feeling you speak of.
Ben: I will say, there was a song I wrote fairly early on that really felt like a breakthrough. It’s a song that’s now available on The Iowa Years called “Baby Come Back.” I wrote it in late 2001, a couple months after going through a pretty sad and complicated breakup. I didn’t regret ending the relationship, but I definitely regretted how I went about it, and for a good stretch there, every night as I went to sleep, all of these thoughts bubbled up to the surface and kept me awake. (Consciences can be so annoying like that.)
So I thought, “Okay, I’m gonna write all this out.” And the next night, when the thoughts bubbled up, I wrote “Baby Come Back.” It was the first time I used my lyrics as a sort of self-therapy, to process and contextualize everything I was thinking. I hadn’t developed my lyric-writing tools yet so the song feels pretty raw, but there was a level of honesty I’d never achieved before, and as a result I consider it my first real song. More importantly, it did the trick—once I finished writing it, I stopped losing sleep over the matter. So I knew I was onto something.
Sarah: Deliberately writing yourself through the emotions sounds like an official songwriter move and a wise human move. Let’s talk about a song you wrote some 18 years later, and recorded for your recent album, “Magnet On Your Refrigerator.” I have this distinct memory of listening to an early demo of it on my phone, while getting ready for a night out on the town (aka, folk conference). I thought it was gorgeous immediately. An excellent weaving of personal details that may or may not be accurate, with universal truths, and a catchy-as-all-get-out melody. Can you tell us about that song?
Ben: That’s right! I forgot I sent you an early demo of the song! (Or maybe I didn’t forget? Gadzooks, is this a personal detail that may or may not be accurate???)
Sarah: Um—that’s a very songwriter-y move right there.
Ben: “Magnet” initially came from an observation I’d made about the romanticization of Nashville. I was working in a lot of Americana groups at the time, and you’d get this sense of Nashville being presented as a sort of end-all mecca, the place where dreams come true and everything is magical. So in that first verse, I tried to draw on as many Americana-ish tropes as I could think of—phrases like “green as hell,” “hit the dirt” … I knew whiskey and the devil had to be in there somewhere.
But I also didn’t want the song to be sarcastic or cynical, so I chose to make most of it personal. Rather than be like “ha ha Nashville dumb” (cuz it isn’t), I was way more interested in writing about where I am right now, why I’m perfectly happy living a mile outside Richfield and this life I’ve managed to fall into that means so much to me. The idea of a magnet on a refrigerator is my coming to terms with being quite introverted and socially awkward. It’s a variation of “fly on the wall.” Wanting to be a part of the world, genuinely caring and working to become a better person, but also being okay observing everything from a distance.
A lot of the language is more passive—“won’t you let me be,” “take me to the bridge”—which is also where I’m at right now, surrendering to the general current of the universe rather than constantly staking my claim or vying for attention. (And of course, there’s still some dopey humor in there. It made me giggle way too much to start a bridge with “Take me to the bridge.”)
Ben Cook-Feltz. Photo credit: Tom Smouse.
Sarah: I appreciate the layers upon layers you’ve baked into that song. You sing “take me to the bridge” with absolute earnestness, so perhaps you’ve worked the giggles out?
In our end-of-year About That Song wrap-up, our friend Annie Enneking shared your song “Grilled Cheese” (specifically the live performance of it) as that song for her in 2023. What can you tell us about it?
Ben: That was so dang nice of Annie!! Honestly it took me by surprise and meant the world to me. “Grilled Cheese” is, if not the most personal song I’ve ever written, certainly the most emotionally raw. I went through a pretty intense falling-out a few years ago with some folks who meant the world to me. It was a dumb situation, time has passed and everything’s cool now, but that didn’t change the way I felt and how deeply it affected me. (Apparently you can still say really stupid stuff when you’re 40. I’d always hoped I left my immature inclinations behind when I graduated college, but no! No, I can still pout with the best of them!)
The after-effects really were profound, to the point where I genuinely lost the desire to continue being a musician and wasn’t sure what to do. I felt sad, angry, confused, misunderstood, embarrassed—but more than anything, because it wasn’t some huge public spat, I felt like I was dealing with a lot of these feelings alone. Screaming into a void that had no reason to care.
So, much like “Baby Come Back” 20 years earlier, I channeled these feelings into “Grilled Cheese.” It’s an angry cry from a wounded animal. I wanted to write about how I felt, but also question why I felt this way—how could a few words and actions make me feel so rueful? Has this happened before? Is this really the person I want to be? (I’m pretty sure if I’d written the song in my 20s, it would have simply been “Y’all done me wrong you stupid dummies.” At this point in my life I’m way more interested in exploring what I did to contribute to it. Look for my next album, My Name Is Ben And I’m Probably A Stupid Dummy, sometime in 2026!)
Honestly, the whole time I wrote it, I was channeling Mary Bue, who is so damn gifted as a songwriter, but especially her way of being very frank with emotions, and being very frank with language. It was an intense song to write, it was an intense song to record, and it’s an intense song to play, so much so that at my release show in October, I said that it could very well be the only time I ever perform it live. It just puts all those feelings and emotions front and center again, and I don’t like sitting there.
What does mean a lot to me is how this song seems to have resonated with people. Even if it’s just a few people, this song gets highlighted a lot. Songwriters I love and admire—like Annie!!—have singled out that tune and said some really dang nice things about it. And that means a lot. Because it really was a song I wrote to make myself feel better, and I wrote it when I wasn’t sure I was going to keep going. But I did, and the song’s out there, and I’m really touched that people like it.
Sarah: I do a lot of writing from the “What did I do?” place, because … it feels like the truest place to start, and songs I have written from the “y’all done me wrong” place always feel AWKWARD to perform. (To bring it full circle here, I did recently have a blast performing one of those songs with Annie Enneking, so … small world?)
According to Iowa Public Radio, you are “Paul Simon singing songs about broken hearts and pants.” I’m sure Paul Simon has sung quite a bit about broken hearts, maybe even pants a time or two, but, I’m curious—can you tell us about that song from your catalog? The broken hearts and pants one?
Ben: Little-known fact: The working title of Simon’s “The Obvious Child” was “The Obvious Pants”!
That IPR quote comes from the late 2000s, so I’m pretty sure it’s referring to two songs. “Broken heart”’ probably comes from a song I wrote called “This Broken Heart.” (I mean, it makes sense, right?) Although I wrote a lot of sad Elliott Smith-y songs in my 20s, so who knows. The “pants” bit comes from a song called “The Clues I Laid Out”; the first line is “Abigail, you’ve caught me with my pants down.” (For the record, there is no Abigail. It was just a three-syllable name that sounded good.) Both songs are now available on The Iowa Years. “This Broken Heart” was a co-write with my friend Justin Baumgartner, and to this day it’s the only time I’ve written a melody and lyrics to someone else’s music. I love that song; I don’t think I’d have written that melody if I’d gone about it alone.
“The Clues I Laid Out” was based on someone I had an innocent crush on, who was never supposed to know about it … and then she found out. When you’re 21 and awkward, that’s songwriting gold, baby! Even though that’s the only pants-related song I’ve written to this point, I still love that IPR quote. And who knows, maybe inspiration will strike and some other pants-themed tune will present itself. I do love that word. Pants. It’s a very funny word. Especially when you say it multiple times. Pants pants pants.
Sarah: For a while, I used pants as a suffix to most emotional words. I would be “sad-pants” or “mad-pants.” Our kids were young, it made us laugh. And should you find a way to sing about pants again in the future—I’ll look forward to hearing about that song!
Do you have any Midwest shows coming up in the next few months where we might hear you sing some of these songs we’ve been talking about?
Ben: My full band is at the Aster on March 22, alongside j. bell and the Lazy Susan Band! In addition to that, I’m playing a special hometown show at my hometown church in April (the Cedar Valley Unitarian Universalists in Cedar Falls Iowa), a house concert up in Bemidji in June, and every third Sunday, you can catch me and Dan Gaarder making music at Dusty’s in Northeast Minneapolis. Our March guest is Haley E Rydell!
Go see Ben Cook-Feltz with j. bell and the Lazy Susan Band at the Aster Cafe in Minneapolis on Friday, March 22! Get more information and make reservations.
Listen to “Grilled Cheese”
Trucks Album Credits
Produced by Peter Remiger and Ben Cook-Feltz
Engineered by Peter Remiger and Tom Herbers
Mastered by Greg Reierson
BCF - Keys, piano, drums, percussion, vocals, Q-Chord
Andy Schuster - Bass, Guitar, Vocals
Cole Mickelson - Guitar, Vocals
Jim Crimmings - Drums
Jaspar Lepak - Guitar, Vocals
Jason Roberts, Peter Remiger, Brandon Henry - Guitars
Brent Fuqua - Mandolin
Lightnin’ Joe Peterson - B3
Mother Banjo - Banjo
Aaron Fabbrini - Pedal Steel
David Hirsch - Saxophone
Haley E Rydell, Matthew French, Doug Collins, Jon Rodine, Brian Allen, Vonnie Kyle - Vocals
Recorded mostly at Peter’s place, as well as The Hideaway and Creation Audio
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Sarah Morris. Photo credit: Tom Smouse.
Sarah Morris is a superfan of songs and the people who write them, and a believer that certain songs can change your life. A singer-songwriter / mama / bread maker / coffee drinker who recently released her fifth album of original material, she’s been known to joyfully sing with people in her Big Green Bathroom.
