Turbo Pastel is a project of Ben Burwell where he musically shares his view of the world as if we were looking out the window together. There’s a definite twang to the sound but an electronic edge as well. It’s layered and interesting. You can hear Ben play December 7 at the White Squirrel for a Tom
Waits tribute show.
Please tell us about Turbo Pastel.
In 2017, after years of playing with friends, I started writing and recording music alone. For a few years, it was pretty private and intimate. I didn’t share my music with anyone really other than close friends. Making music like that was a way for me to maintain my relationship to songwriting without participating in the rigamarole of self-promotion (a sport I’m bad at and have little interest in playing). In the spring of 2020, I caught a blast of inspiration after listening to an interview with Elizabeth Gilbert (she is not celebrated enough). In that interview, she was reflecting on her, and her good friend Tom Wait’s relationship to muses. I had always been familiar with the idea of muses, but did not take it seriously until listening to her speak.
That idea of muses hung around, and after a while I took off to writing Turbo’s “Debut.” An interview Terry Gross did with John Prine also gave me license to write behind the wheel, I started paying more attention to everyone around me, and writing down my thoughts more frequently. The rest is a rather uninteresting story about recording those inspirations.
You put out an acoustic album in June 2023 (Dudewalker) and just released Turbo Pastel last month (Oct 2023). Half of the songs on Dudewalker show up in a rockier version on Turbo Pastel. I like the idea of two versions; what inspired you to do two albums this way?
When I commit to writing a song I like to disappear into it. Like a lot of people, there are places I wish I could go that don’t exist, and writing songs is a way for me to go there. Those make believe places are the most vivid when it is just me and a guitar. I am very proud of the big record we made, but the big record is kind of like the prize pig at the MN State Fair. There is a big fancy barn, a big blue ribbon, and the pig is put under lights, in a pen, in the middle of the room. But that pig probably had a modest little barn it grew up in, and I bet it had siblings, and maybe it lived way out somewhere quiet. That is the prize pig’s real story, not just the week it gets shown at the fair. I wanted to make sure that there was a written record of the beginnings of those songs that those muses gave me, so that I could try and remember them and go back there, however imperfect.
Can you tell us about Babble On? I hear more social commentary in this song in a gentle way that might help listeners recognize themselves.
I am one of those poor folks that has the masochistic tendency to familiarize themselves with everything social and political. I can’t help it. In the summer of 2020 I was glued to the news and Twitter like everyone else, and it drove me crazy. I was trimming out a big arch-top window in south Minneapolis when Good Times by Sam Cooke came on. After that I listened to it a hundred times in a row. I could take a guess as to what Mr. Cooke was meaning to say under that pop song, but I understand that song to basically be saying “I choose joy in the face of everything.” Good Times feels like defiant joy, and
that felt really right to me at that moment. I wanted to try my hand at that same spirit, so I tried to illustrate the abundance of chatter that was around me at that time in the verses, but then try and assure the listener (and myself) that there are corners all around us to escape to, even for just a little while, and that that can be medicine.
Musically, Go Home, Jacob is quite different (more dance-friendly) than Babble On but seems to share an ethos. I hear a story in the song that I want to know more about.
Go Home, Jacob is commentary on the event’s immediately following George Floyd’s murder. Importantly, I mean “commentary” as a descriptive spoken account, not as an expression of opinion. I happened to be listening to some Dylan around that time. I’ve always thought of Dylan as making decidedly descriptive social commentary, and that is one of the many reasons I consider his work to be so important. Social commentary in songwriting that drifts into advocacy or activism has only ever sat right with me in punk-oriented genres. I’m not sure why that is. Dylan avoids that rub for me by being an
observer who often avoids interjection by the creator/narrator. I find that approach to be all the more powerful. I live in south Minneapolis, and like everyone else I was all stirred up during those weeks. When I came across the video of Jacob Frey being shouted down in front of his condo I was taken aback. The stakes in that moment were put in stark relief, and the powerful emotions of those days now had faces and names. It was a Shakespearian scene with a powerful man being called to the street to stand on one side of the line or the other. After that I just did my best Dylan impression, and wrote what I thought I saw.
Do you have any upcoming shows or places we’re likely to see you play in 2024?
I’ll be joining a bunch of amazing musician’s on Dec 7th at the White Squirrel to celebrate Tom
Waits. A tribute show.
And just one show booked so far for next year. March 20, from 7-9 at MetroNOME with Emmy
Woods.
Otherwise I’ll be trying to book it up.
Cheers
Mostly Minnesota 