About benjamin jayne
Thoughts on Broken
“Broken: It’s like a slow-motion plane crash, a mild-mannered mid-life meltdown, like that moment in a night terror where you are screaming to wake yourself up.”
‘Benjamin Jayne,’ is a project that Benjamin Wright sustains out of Brattleboro, Vermont.
His music has been compared to bands like The National, Nick Drake, and Beck, and his baritone vocals have been compared to Leonard Cohen. However, his new record “Broken” (coming 10/13/23) reveals an entirely new vocal range. The music tends to be on the darker side, melancholic and reflective and is typically considered folk rock. Though he uses interesting electronic elements and sometimes gets a little too heavy to be called folk.
Broken continues in the realm of melancholia. It primarily deals with people trying to reconcile who they are now compared to who they remember themselves to be before the current of time got a hold of them. It is about seeing our reflection and being unrecognizable to ourselves and then facing the challenge of unraveling all of the elements we have wrapped ourselves in that don’t feel genuine. The album seeks truth and rebirth.
His work under Benjamin Jayne is a solo venture, but he does enjoy the input and occasional song from his sister Amanda Jayne, an artist based out of Barcelona. He also consistently enlists Drew Skinner for engineering and production, though Benjamin co-produces on all the albums.
Benjamin practices psychiatry by day at one of the country’s smallest hospitals, where he is the director of psychiatry. He also has a background in performance and songwriting, having studied film scoring and jazz performance at Berklee College of Music. He played in multiple bands over the last two decades and worked as a professional multi-instrumentalist in Los Angeles for a while before changing fields from music to psychiatry.
Theater is the second album recorded by Benjamin Jayne. A project that originally revolved around brother and sister Benjamin and Amanda Wright with the album HI-LO. However, Theater was primarily a solo effort, written and recorded by Benjamin, with Drew Skinner handling mixing and production and Amanda contributing singing, piano, and bells on several songs and a composition of her own.
Theater was released by WhatAboutMusic on May 7, 2021.
The album was wonderfully crafted; it’s more rock-driven than their debut release, HI-LO, but still maintains a good deal of folk/singer-songwriter stylings while adding electronic elements and moving towards psychedelic folk. Its tone is slightly darker than its predecessor’s – not surprisingly, since it was written primarily during the tragic and tumultuous year 2020. Writing and recording these songs served as a catharsis to a lot of the chaos, merging anger, frustration, disbelief, depression, and anxiety with reminders of youth and innocence, joy, and hopefulness.
Drew Skinner handled engineering but also added to some of the production work. He was Benjamin’s college roommate when the two were studying at Berklee College of Music. Drew comes from a background in electronic music, sound design, production, and engineering and also releases music under Duskrider.
Their debut, HI-LO, was released in the summer of 2019 and garnered critical acclaim. Following the excitement of working on HI-LO, Benjamin decided to continue on and make more music, and Theater is the result. Benjamin predominates on the new album as Amanda had transitioned careers and was not able to spend as much time writing or recording but was still a part of some decisions and performances and contributed the song “Shake the Vaults” and wrote the lyrics to “Running Around.”
Amanda Jayne continues to write and record; you can find her work here.