Episode 15: Ben Abraham

Episode Transcript

Adam Burke: Welcome to The Cockatoo, reporting on what Australians are up to in music in the USA. My name is Adam Burke and we're coming to you from Hollywood, California, which is Tongva and Chumash country. In these interviews, we get into musical journeys to the United States. Today we are joined by songwriter and performer Ben Abraham. As a recording artist, Ben has solo releases with Secretly Canadian and Atlantic. He has also collaborated with artists including Sara Bareilles, Nash and Kesha, with whom he wrote the hit Praying, as well as Ben Platt, with whom he wrote the hit Grow As We Go.

Needless to say, Ben's work has had billions of streams, but throughout his journey, Ben has also had his fair share of ups and downs. To avoid spoilers, I'll just let you know he is currently independent. Let's find out the details from the man himself. Welcome, Ben.

Ben Abraham: Thanks guys. Thanks for having me.

Adam Burke: All right then, so let's get into it. Where did you grow up?

Ben Abraham: I grew up in Melbourne, born and raised in Melbourne, and I've only ever lived here until I moved to LA five years ago.

Adam Burke: Tell us about your upbringing, about your folks and your journey into music.

Ben Abraham: I had a very musical upbringing. My parents, when they were younger, in their 20s, were folk musicians in Indonesia. My mum's Australian, white Australian, and my dad's Indonesian, and my mum went over to Indonesia with her family and met my dad and joined his little band that he was in, and they ended up becoming quite famous in Indonesia in the '70s for just like a minute. They had one particular song that did very well, that even to this day is just one of the most well-known Indonesian pop songs ever.

By the time I was born, they had left that life behind, they became Christians and became radically passionate about their faith. By the time I was born, they were still singing, but they were singing in a context of church, not so much doing performances and things. I grew up in an environment where music was just in the house. Both my parents sang, my dad played guitar and piano, and there's five kids in my family and all of us sing, we all used to grow up singing harmonies.

The more tortured memories I have were some years we would go and sing Christmas carols in shopping malls and stuff as a family, which I used to hate. I grew up just surrounded by music and surrounded by spirituality. All of that, I now, like things that I used to cringe at when I was younger, I now realize are the foundation for the musician that I've become. I'm very grateful for all of it.

Adam Burke: What instruments do you play? You're obviously a great singer and songwriter, what instruments?

Ben Abraham: Thank you. I play-- Piano is probably my main one. I never learned any of them. I'm self-taught on everything, but piano is my main instrument that I feel the most comfortable on. Guitar I learned as a necessity because I found it really hard to tour on piano in very, very early days when I used to open for friends. I was always at the mercy of if they had a piano and if they would let me use it. I learned guitar just to force myself to be able to travel with something. 4:10 In the early days of my career, I used to write songs on my ukulele. It was the first time that I felt like, "Oh, this is my thing. This is like what I--" I'm not especially great at ukulele. What is a great ukulele player? I don't know. They're the three. Then I try and write on lots of different instruments. If you go to my studio in LA, I just collect interesting looking instruments because I think it's interesting to write on stuff that's weird.

Adam Burke: We're going to do a fast forward here, and we're going to go all the way to the point that you came out to the US. I'm not talking about your first visit, but the first time you actually moved and made that decision and whatnot. What year was that?

Ben Abraham: It was January 2020.

Adam Burke: Oh, right. Okay. Interesting. Here we go. Yes. You come out in January 2020. How did you go about it? What was going on in your life and what was the logistics involved in that?

Ben Abraham: I had signed a record deal. I self-produced my first album and then Secretly Canadian came across it, loved it, helped me release it. Then around that time, I started doing some songwriting for other people. One of my demos got across the desk of Craig Kallman, who is, I think, still the president of Atlantic Records. Craig heard these songs that I had written and was like, "Why are you signed to an indie label? You should be doing big, bombastic pop music." I was enamored by that. It wasn't wrong in terms of some of my aspirations.

Then for over a three-year period, I got bought out. My contract with Secretly Canadian got bought out by Atlantic Records, and it took a long time. In that, over 2019, with Atlantic, I'd made my second album, which is called Friendly Fire. It was the dream experience where every single thing I wanted to do, they just let me do. We spent so much money. That album has to have cost at least 200 and something thousand dollars. We got to do it in this beautiful, big old studio. We did it at Barefoot Recording, which doesn't exist anymore, but it's the studio where Stevie Wonder made Songs in the Key of Life. I got to play his piano on my record.

It was one of those-- Just the whole A&R experience, the whole making of the record was a dream, and that was all over 2019 The plan was to release the album in May of 2020. I packed everything into a storage unit in 2020, gave up my place in Melbourne, and got on a plane to LA, and started renting my house in LA, and was excited for this massive album that I was going to put out, and the crazy success that was going to follow.

I went into the Atlantic building and played it for Julie Greenwald, who was at the time the CEO of--she was the COO of Atlantic Records. I did that thing where when you're signed to a major label, you go around and you meet all your team, you meet your social team, your art and design team, you meet the marketing team, just everyone that you're going to potentially be working with. What was happening through this project, people were hearing the music, and all of my team were all the heads of departments, so I had the head of the marketing department working with me, I had the head of the design department and stuff.

It was just, everyone was so excited about it. Julie Greenwald was like, "This is great, I want you to come with me to play this for all the heads of Warner Music around the world, we have a conference, you're going to come with me in Miami, you're going to play it." It really felt like the year was shaping up to be my year.

Adam Burke: You get yourself to the point where you're getting tremendous interest across the Pacific as discussed, you come here, obviously January 2020. You've got this big release planned with Atlantic for your second studio album, your first one with them, COVID hits, what happens?

Ben Abraham: What happened was album was supposed to come out around May, June. They're like, "It's going to come out probably more like August. We're going to have a little shutdown." I look back and if they had said to me, this is got where the music industry is shutting down for two years, I would have packed all my stuff up and gotten straight on a plane, put everything back onto a ship and gone back to Melbourne.

The hindsight, the 2020 vision of hindsight, I can say all that confidently. What happened was it just kept getting pushed back. "Oh, okay, now it's May. It's not looking like it's clearing up. I think it's going to be more like October." By August, it's like, "It's not going to be this year." Basically, the album ended up coming out two years later in 2022. It's hard not to feel like-- basically, my feeling is that the entire music industry changed in that time. That I look at the end of the day, the work speaks for itself or it doesn't. I don't want to suggest that if the world hadn't changed, my work would have been better received.

It's hard not to feel like the whimper rather than bang that happened when my album came out was in part informed by the fact that it felt like we were playing a board game. I had gotten really good at the board game to the point where all these powerful gatekeepers and legacy industry bodies were going, "This is great, you are doing really well." Then by the time the album came out, the entire board game had changed. All those people that were gatekeepers that had anointed me had lost all of their power, and it was the wild west. The album came out in 2022. It did fine. It wasn't particularly great.

Then in 2023, I got a call from Craig Kallman who still loves me and loves my work and will always be a great supporter of mine. I'm so appreciative of it. He basically was like, "Ben, we lost about a million dollars on your project. We just have to figure out what we do." I remember being like, "Great, I'm about to get dropped." Then sure enough, two months later, almost a year to the date that my album came out, I was dropped from Atlantic, and I've been independent ever since, and a million dollars in debt.

Adam Burke: In that period, so obviously there's the COVID period where everything's chaos and no one knows what's going on with lockdowns and everything. Then there is that little window that opens up from May 2021 when vaccines were widely available in the United States. What happened in that period between the slight breakthrough in vaccines and then up until the point where you get the call from Craig?

Ben Abraham: I think by that point, the media landscape had already become so fractured. If you think pre-COVID, someone could appear on a late show or on Saturday Night Live and do a really good set or a really good performance. That could give them an entire career. These legacy bodies, institutions could basically be kingmakers for certain people. A good article, a good review on Pitchfork, things like that. Because of the pandemic and TikTok, and among other things, it's not just TikTok, but TikTok was a big part of it, everybody's brains fractured and started getting their information from a million different things. All of the late night shows lost their potency and lost half of their audience.

Suddenly, a great performance on any of those shows didn't matter in the way that they used to. Part of the benefit of being signed to a major label is not just that they have the money to pay for the record, but also that they have the relationships with the legacy institutions to get you the spots on Ellen, on The Tonight Show, on Saturday Night Live. Suddenly, those things didn't matter, it was like Monopoly money. It's like I played on Kelly Clarkson, and it wasn't in studio because we were still COVID-conscious, so it was a pre-recorded, and it just did nothing.

Once upon a time, a good daytime TV performance could get you thousands of ticket sales or a million views on YouTube, and stuff, and it did nothing. It did nothing to move the needle. I think I got maybe 10 more followers on Instagram. The world just completely shifted in terms of how people were consuming and finding music. Because of that, every marketing person at Atlantic, by the time you deliver your record, your creative team are done. Then it's entirely Julie Greenwald and her team that are looking at my project.

I think that they were all just looking at the amount of money that they'd spent on the creative, and they were going, "Okay, we have to find a way to get this out into this new landscape of media consumption in a way that justifies what we spent on it." We all just went into problem solving mode of like, "How do we do it? Is it a big music video campaign? Is it like getting you on the road with people?" Looking back, I definitely think we wasted a lot of time just sitting in a room scratching our heads going, "How do we do it?"

Now I just think for anyone who's looking at putting out their own music, I just think the key is get the music out as soon as you can. Because nobody can control anything. I think we spent too long trying to formulate the perfect release plan. We're going, "Let's wait for the world to get back to normal a bit. Wait till touring can happen consistently before we do it." We just overthought all of it. By the time it came out, it was March, or I think I can't even remember the specific date now, May 2022 or something. It just ultimately none of it mattered.

Adam Burke: You may have found yourself at a pivot point for the realignment of big music there.

Ben Abraham: I think I did. Look, now, as of this year, Atlantic lost hundreds of employees. Julie Greenwald's gone. It's complete restructure. Because, again, what do they have to offer? They can't-- Atlantic, I had the same A&R, Craig Kallman, yes, but also his number two A&R for me at the time was Mollie Lehman, who's also an amazing person. They had Chappell Roan as well. They in fact had Pink Pony Club, made that record and dropped her because it wasn't working. Then, of course, not only is she big, but even the music she had with Atlantic, so the music that they had is now huge, but they gave it up because nobody knows what they're doing. Those big institutions, they can't king make anymore.

There's a phenomenon, I think Billboard or someone wrote an article about this phenomenon that happened around 2021, 2022, where there was a decrease in breaking artists because nobody knows how to break through the noise anymore. Yes, it's just this is the new age of the music industry, and I think that I was caught right at the transition. How do I complain? They spent a million dollars on me, I'm not allowed to complain, but also feels so traumatic.

Adam Burke: I'm sure this is a life's work answer, but can you give us an idea of how you were able to get so much US attention before you'd even come to the US?

Ben Abraham: It helped that I'd basically been ignored by Australia in terms of the industry. I just was one of those people.

I think that galvanized in me a feeling that I had to make things happen for myself. Australia, what's interesting growing up here and now that I've lived in America, I've recognized in Australia, because the government has a role to play in the arts, there are all these doorways in front of young artists like Triple J. My reference is going to be outdated now because I'm sure that it's changed. When I was younger, it was like Triple J unearthed and different festivals that you could-- Queenscliff Music Festival doing like a almost like an open mic thing.

All these little things that you could sign up for as an artist, and you would wait for the gatekeepers to then let you through into the next thing. I didn't get any of those opportunities. I looked at the internet instead, and went, "All right, I'm going to make YouTube videos. I'm going to just approach my career differently." I think because of that, my work just became seen by overseas people more. I also-- I wasn't trying to do much in Australia because I felt so rejected by the industry here.

I was much more comfortable reaching out to Americans. Basically, I got signed by American management who heard my stuff and just feel like, "We love this and we think we know what to do with it." They were the ones that took it into Secretly Canadian and got me that first record deal. Yes, it happened that America found me as much as I-- I wasn't even specifically trying to get to America. I was just putting my work online and then Americans heard it.

Adam Burke: Are you working on an album or anything? You're obviously an independent artist these days. You can do whatever you want. Where are you at with your creative side?

Ben Abraham: I will say I have really learned that one of the amazing things about working with a label is that they pay for your recording costs. Being independent, the first thing people say when you say I got dropped, a lot of the time people go, "Oh, congrats." I think to help compensate for the discouragement of losing a business partner. I understand the beauty of having creative control. I also miss having someone pay for my invoices when I've worked with great producers, which is all to say I haven't figured out what the next step is. Economically, it's expensive to make the kind of music that I want to make.

I typically like to work with real musicians. I'm not someone that likes to just sit on my own in a bedroom and do everything. I love to have that drummer and that bass player. I just think that makes for beautiful music, but all that stuff costs so much. I don't know. My life feels very existential at the moment. I've been writing. I've been writing new stuff. There's no specific plan. I have dreams of what the next album would be, but right now I think I'm trying to just get through the next couple of months and see where I land.

Adam Burke: If you had to go back to, we'll say, January 2020, and give the Ben of those four or five years ago some advice, would you have any?

Ben Abraham: It's a really good question because what I immediately want to say to him is move back to Melbourne. It's an impossible question because there are also so many things that have happened in the time that I've been in LA that wouldn't have happened if I'd left. The first few things that come to mind, Gillian Bell, who's an actress, reached out to me during the pandemic. During lockdown, she came across my music and loved it so much. She was like, "I want to make a music video for you." That music video ended up being the one she did with my song, If I Didn't Love You, that features Charlie Day and Mary Elizabeth Ellis from It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia. He's one of my favorite actors.

It was just a dream day, and I got to work with people that I think are just geniuses. That honestly wouldn't have happened if I wasn't living in LA. At the start of this year, I got a message from Lily James that she was a big fan of my work. We ended up getting to make a video together that also just happened to be because she was like, "I'm coming to LA in March." I, of course, live there. It just was a convergence of things. I don't know. I both want to say, "Ben, move back home. Save your money that you've made from your Kesha song. Don't waste it on crazy rant in LA."

At the same time, would I wipe out the last four years? I don't know. It's been traumatic and depressing, but also some really beautiful things have happened. I think maybe at the very least, I would just say whatever happens next, you're going to be okay. Life is long. You just never know what's coming around the bend.

Adam Burke: I think all of our listeners are on the edge of their seats waiting for the next direction for the career of Ben Abraham. It's been an absolute pleasure talking to you today, Ben. We really appreciate you joining us, and thank you for all the wonderful work over the years so far.

Ben Abraham: My pleasure. Thanks. Thanks for having me. Thanks for chatting.

Adam Burke: Absolutely. You've been listening to The Cockatoo. This is the interview part of our newsletter where we talk about Australian experiences in music in the United States. We are a 501(c)(3) non-profit. The Pitchhiker Foundation supports us in any way you support non-profits, particularly by sharing, liking and telling your family and friends. Thank you. and we'll catch you on the next edition.