Benjamin Dakota Rogers Q&A

By Tosin Faseemo

Benjamin Dakota Rogers is a folk singer from Ontario, Canada. He just released an album called “Better By Now.” Read on to find out how he got started in music and how he developed his spontaneous songwriting method.

What initially sparked your interest in music ?

Initially, my grandfather. The first time I met him, I was seven years old and he came down from Timmins, Ontario. His father had just passed away and he brought down his violin; his dad was a popular fiddle player up there. There was some sort of sibling dispute over who the violin should go to, and so he just took the violin and brought it down to give to me. I don’t know why, he just did. And that was the first time that I met him. Then there was a violin in the house, and I was super excited about that I guess, and I asked my parents to put me in lessons. They bought me a much smaller violin that fit me and they put me in lessons a couple weeks later. I took lessons all the way up until grade twelve. And I was really really into fiddle music and violin, and then around grade twelve I started writing songs... with the intent to sing them for other people, and it just became what I do. I fell in love with writing songs, but originally I fell in love with playing the fiddle, and from there, I learned how to play the banjo and mandolin and all the other folky instruments. 

Is there anything specific about folk music that drew you in?

It’s what my family listens to. It’s pretty honest; it’s not like electronic music or stuff where like if you’re not good enough to play the stuff you just don’t get to play it. Like on a violin, right, if there’s a really complicated song, unless you’ve practiced and you’re good at it, you won’t be able to make it sound like that. Anyone with a computer now can find a way to make something beautiful, but there’s an honesty that comes from acoustic music in general. The songs I write are fairly story oriented, a lot of them. I think I enjoyed it and I just kind of fell into it, and then I found more reasons to love it because it was part of my life. 

Do you have any musical influences?

A lot of the early music I was learning was all out of these books on old traditional fiddle songs, and I think that influenced me more than I realized for quite a while. Other than that, lots of modern stuff coming out of the states, like Gregory Alan Isakov, Langhorne Slim, Joe Purdy, and The Milk Carton Kids. A lot of that stuff is what I fell in love with. I don’t know if they influenced the way that I play, the way I write, or the way I sing, but they definitely inspired me to be a folk musician. They are just really beautiful artists and musicians who are creating something that makes me want to create something that other people want to listen to. 

What’s your songwriting process like?

I write most of my songs really late at night. I turn on a microphone and I’ll write the lyrics and the guitar part at the same time and just record like half an hour of me making things up. Sometimes, there’s fully finished songs and sometimes there’s nothing usable. I try to write almost every day. It seems to come mostly from how I’m feeling that day. I just kind of spew that into a microphone while playing guitar and sometimes it’s something that I really like.

Do you like performing live? 

I really love it actually. It’s funny, I would say my favorite thing about getting to be a musician is writing songs. I think it's just writing new songs and then getting to perform them in front of people. I love it so much. We played a really, really terrible tour this spring. A bunch of things fell through and we weren’t making any money, and I still loved being on tour because I really loved playing. I’ve always really loved playing that’s how all of this kind of ended up coming about. Yeah, I love performing and playing. It’s wonderful. 

Do you like interacting with the crowd? I know some performers are really into that. But I guess with folk it’s probably different since you’re telling a story.

I don’t know. I love getting people to sing along and dance and just enjoy themselves and have a good time… It’s a show that we’re playing, but I don’t want it to be a show like something we put on; I don’t want it to be some persona thing. I just want to be like, “here's some songs that I wrote.” So what I do, it’s not an incredibly interactive thing. I really love when I can get people to sing along and be part of it, but I just want to sing songs that I wrote and share music that I think is nice. 

So you just released an album, “Better By Now.” The album art is really cute; it kind of looks like a polaroid picture. I was just wondering, who is the little kid on the cover, and why’d you choose that photo?

That’s actually me. My mom took that picture. It was in the middle of summer and that was my bath, she took that picture when I was just a little kid and I saw it when I was going through some photo albums around the time we were making the record and I sent it to my manager and he was like, “ah, this is great!” It became the album cover because it was kind of cute and it was cool. I just thought it was nice.

Benjamin Dakota Rogers is currently touring through the U.S. and Canada.