Scott Smith Photography Inc.
In some respects, the story of The Vaad’s new album doesn’t differ from those of countless new records. It’s grounded in the story of a songwriter, in this case Ben Kaplan, who takes time crafting his work, using all the new technology tools available to independent producers today. Capturing a little bit of time here, a touch more time there, our subject makes the most of his surroundings, grabbing session time while on the road, even cutting tracks while on the plane to conferences, the ultimate in mixing work with pleasure.
The end result for Kaplan’s alter-ego The Vaad is a record called Kissing the Sea on the Lips, a nine-song work that incorporates a host of different influences, recording styles and uses of both electronically-generated sounds alongside live musicians. Featuring a lyrical approach that’s a more serious-minded than the average release, Kissing is the classic labor of love, an eight-year project that only reached Kaplan’s feeling of full completion this spring.
Perhaps it’s not surprising that Kaplan’s memories of his earliest bands run like so: “I was a recording geek, already, but I didn’t know it at the time. The stuff I’d enjoy doing was being the guy who’d string microphones from the ceiling, in order to record the band. The rest of my time was spent in my bedroom, creating avant-garde bass records. One was ‘Lasagna on the Wall.’ I can still, to this day, sit down and draw the cover of that album. I’m sure the tape’s still in a box somewhere.”
Music for Kaplan began, in earnest, with the selection of the French horn during fourth-grade band’s instrument selection process. Perhaps presaging an interest in the visual arts, it was nothing more than the look of that instrument that hooked him. Though he achieved a bit of skill with the horn, he migrated over to the bass by his tweens, using his bar mitzvah money to secure a headless Cort bass, the kind that approximated the look and feel of Duran Duran’s trendsetting John Taylor.
“I was never able to achieve that popping style that he used, but I found out later that a lot of that came from overdubs,” Kaplan remembers, with a smile. “I’m a child of the ’80s. You can quote me as saying that John Taylor’s one of the people that got me interested in playing the bass.”
Another ah-ha moment, and maybe the key one, came when listening to the music of Suzanne Vega. He felt that his sister’s choice in music was a simple one: Vega’s a folkie, little more. But in listening to the work, he came to appreciate the role played by producer Mitchell Froom. If Taylor held sway as an influence before then, it was now Froom that was informing the young musician.
“I realized there was this person called a producer,” he says. “And that’s really how I see myself.”
That mindset could certainly be applied to his painstaking work on Kissing, which not only covers a lot of lyrical territory—focusing as much on history, geography and “other kinds places” as it does on relationships—it frequently features cuts that run up to, and over, the five-minute mark. These aren’t pop trifles.
While all the songs are based in he calls “sketches”—sometimes shared in unfinished form on his Soundcloud page—he was motivated to bring in a host of different musical voices to the final mix, like top local players John Horton (The Bottle Rockets, Karate Bikini) and Jack Petracek (The Painkillers). As a true family affair, he also had his sisters guest on some cuts, adding backing vocals. In fact, in one case, the experience didn’t wind up on the final product, but does show the lengths to which Kaplan attempted to capture sound.
“My sister was eight months pregnant with twins,” he says. “She wanted to sing, but she was at the point where she’d gotten really big. And when we started recording, she wasn’t able to get what she wanted, as the babies were pressuring her diaphragm. We had her laying in bed, on her side, setting up the mics in such a way as to record her that way, running the mics into my laptop. I wish that I’d taken a photo of that recording setup.”
Admittedly, most of the work took part in these unusual environments. At home, recording means working in a second bedroom. He’s also got a multi-media studio on The Hill, where his visual storytelling company, act3, is located; there he’s able to indulge in all his passions, as the space is set up for everything from video editing to still photography.
And, as you one might guess, spending time with the visuals of the project is a part of his approach, too. His site, vaadmusic.com, is a layered affair, with links out to his presences on YouTube, Bandcamp, Soundcloud and iTunes. He figures that these days, “you meet people where they are,” though he’s still not sure which pieces of the puzzle will wind up reaching the most possible listeners. A self-professed “record store nerd,” he’s also toying with bringing the project to vinyl.
“As a DIY musician—and so many have said this that it’s become cliché—these new tools allow me to serve as my own record company,” he says. “And my own distribution arm. They’re central to the framework of any independent musician.”
Kaplan admits to a sense of relief that the album’s in the state that’s in today. That it’s out in a public context, yes. But also that its release allows for a bit of breathing room for other projects.
“In recording, I need space,” he figures. “I pull away for awhile, work on other things, and then come back to the songs with fresh eyes. I would agree that there was a level of finally having to let go. I will freely commit to that. Maybe it’s not exactly the work ‘perfectionism,’ but the album wasn’t done until I felt it was done.”
Today, then, there’s room for not only introducing the new work to the public, there’s mental space to start working on a new album featuring primarily acoustic instrumentation, as well as a hip-hop album on which he’ll primarily be a producer, rather than songwriter. A while back he began collaborating with Brothers Lazaroff, attempting to bring focus to Jewish musicians playing in settings outside of the cultural norm. He’ll keep adding to his “sketches” via Soundcloud, along the way.
Overlaying all of these projects are more workaday concerns. There’s the matter of running his company, an 11-year old partnership between himself and his former college roommate Eric Ratinoff, who lives in New Hampshire. (Lots of Skyping is done.) He’s also married, with two young children, aged two and five, “who share a room and never sleep. It’s a slumber party in there every night.” Add in a variety of other creative projects and collaborations and it’s obvious that Kaplan’s next Vaad outing might not come out for a while. Or it might. Genius can work that way.
“It used to be a matter of having a lifestyle that let me say, ‘Thursday is music day,’” he remembers. “I sneak it in now, but I’m able to do that more and more.”
For now, Kissing is a nice introduction to the man’s work. It features a smart, leveled, interesting approach of songwriting that you can sample, for free (at least for a time) at his Bandcamp page. When you do, see if you can catch an interesting reference point. Kaplan says that the Grateful Dead, in many respects, embody what he respects about music, in that the group brings so very many backgrounds and influences to its collective output. Now, “Kissing” could get played down at The Shanti on a constant loop and the house Deadheads might not make the connection. But Kaplan, it seems, likes to keep ‘em guessing a bit.
“My goal in the next few years,” he says, “is to write for a string quartet. My interests, really, are polyglot.”
