If you ask Benjamin Tod, all country music artists should have to trudge through the mud before hitting it big.
Benjamin Tod joined the Whiskey Riff Raff podcast to talk about his faith, whether or not songwriting can be a spiritual experience, staying grounded while country keeps changing, doing his best to no longer be an antagonist, why staying true matters to yourself matters now more than ever, and much more.
If you’ve ever listened to the often sinister and sincere stylings of Benjamin Tod, you know that the subject matter of his songs can vary from hopeful to as dark as it gets. The country music artist has quite the story to get where he is today – battling drug addiction at a young age, busking to try and make ends meet, and hopping freight trains to travel across the country.
Safe to say he wasn’t handed anything in his country music career, which is why he’s somewhat bothered that many young artists in country music are blowing up on TikTok and becoming sensations without doing much work on the front end. And it’s not the skipping of steps that upsets Tod as much it’s the fact that young artists don’t know much about the history of country music:
“At the root of everything, I want to get back to art. But I also want there to be equal opportunity for people on the bottom end to be able to be heard and be seen. And it’s very, very hard when you have young people that got here by nefarious and easy means – who don’t understand the culture, who don’t know the history. There’s a huge schism in our industry now between people who are (just) basically educated about the history of country music.”
Since Tod has seen Nashville change over the years, he’s seen the industry itself morph, and country music become more widely accepted. The singer-songwriter told us that he remembers a time when venues were not so open to country music, and promoters didn’t understand how to push the genre whatsoever.
Though it might be easy to think of that as a bad thing, Benjamin Tod believes that only allowed for the artists that were well-versed in country’s history to navigate a world that wasn’t so friendly to the genre. Now that country music is welcomed with open arms, the “Using Again” singer thinks it’s shallowed out the need for knowledge, and the typical pains of getting started in the business:
“All of us, we know Dock Boggs and Blind Willie McTell and we know the old English ballads and how they relate to murder ballads from Appalachia and the songs they are derivative from. If you have a clear understanding of that, and your knowledge of country music isn’t just Travis Tritt and Hank Sr…. if you don’t have a fundamental understanding of the history of country music and its impact, then it’s really hard to have a conversation. We’re talking about two different things.
These kids who developed on TikTok and don’t have a real grassroots understanding and didn’t fight for a decade and pay their dues and eat s*** at dive bars for a pitcher of beer and $75 for playing for three hours, for years. It’s like… how the f*** are we supposed to have a conversation about country music? You don’t know a damn thing about it?”
That being said, Tod did take a moment to give credit to Sam Barber and other artists who have benefited from coming up through TikTok, but do have an understanding of country music, thus still being able to grow as artists.
However, his overwhelming feeling is that new artists don’t have a grasp of what being an artist truly means, and Benjamin Tod isn’t afraid to tell it how he sees it:
“It’s very hard for us old heads who clawed our way through the f****** mud to have snotty 25-year-olds who were eating Tide Pods a few years ago tell us what country music is and what our industry should be, and who think that their Spotify followers are more important than their impact.”
@whiskeyriff @Benjamin Tod #whiskeyriffraff #whiskeyriff ♬ original sound – Whiskey Riff
To hear more from Benjamin Tod, make sure to download the podcast on Apple Podcasts by searching “Whiskey Riff Raff” or click here.
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Cheers, y’all.
