Words by Sean Moeller//Illustration by Lisa Romero
“Where else should they go but California, the land of sunshine and oranges? Once there, they discover that sunshine isn’t enough. They get tired of oranges, even of avocado pears and passion fruit. Nothing happens. They don’t know what to do with their time. Their boredom becomes more and more terrible. They realize that they’ve been tricked and burn with resentment. Every day of their lives they read the newspapers and went to the movies. Both fed them on lynchings, murder, sex, crimes, explosions, wrecks, love nests, fires, miracles, revolutions, wars. This daily diet made sophisticates of them. The sun is a joke. Oranges can’t titillate their jaded palates. They have been cheated and betrayed.” – Nathanael West’s The Day of the Locust

The Los Angeles story that Benjy Ferree collected when he left for there seven years ago was like something Nathanael West drummed up, though in his bailout from the place that was going to put him into the pictures, there was far less rioting. In fact, there was no rioting like the kind in the violent final chapters of West’s The Day of the Locust. It was more Ferree getting chewed up and spit out the way F. Scott Fitzgerald was by Hollywood and all its arrogance. L.A. put him on his ass, but there’s a reason for that – and you’ll hear it in Leaving the Nest, his superb debut record. Los Angeles is unforgiving, with a mystique that owns all the nobodies looking to be something others. The above lines from the novel seem to apply to Ferree’s general disagreement with the place, where more dreams don’t come true than actually do. Those words work in Ferree’s case because he found the superficiality to be on the mark. He thought he’d find inspiration and he did, but it was in his own backyard, not where it was supposed to be. While all of the people he was looking to were busy doing heroin and going to the gym, the stereotype ended up being more real than he thought it would be. So he began babysitting, writing more songs, playing open mic nights at Canter’s Deli where Guns ‘N Roses were once the house band and the drummer who survived in the movie “This Is Spinal Tap” was the house drummer (“I never played with him. I just drank with him,” Ferree said.) and gave up on his theatrical aspirations after two months.

“It was my coming of age story. I was out there and completely by myself,” Ferree said. “L.A. changed my life.”

Ferree lived with a friend in the guest house, on a bigger piece of property. Their landlord was an eccentric man, who didn’t know that he was mentoring Ferree with life lessons and his generally scattered lifestyle. They conversed outdoors in the yard because the smell in the landlord’s home was unbearable. He willfully fed rodents and he allowed wild pigeons to live in his rooms.

“The only reason we went in his house was because he had amazing paintings. He’d inherited this guy’s wig and he wore it around. We’d sit outside and he’d sing for hours if you let him. If I hadn’t had this guy…,” Ferree said. “It was such a real existence – the one he was living. I left my car in his driveway in L.A. and came to D.C.”

His departure might have been drawn from some advice he got from the father of the children he babysat (which he loved, “I thought it was nice and it was easy. I watched ‘Yellow Submarine’ everyday with these adorable dudes and girls. Kids don’t give a shit. They’ll call you out. There’s no aesthetic and there’s no front to them,” and which led him to meeting director David Lynch, as a chaperone on a play date, “The only two people I’ve wanted to meet are him and Tom Waits. It was like that first shot in “Mulholland Drive. That’s his garage. It was like being in a dream.”). The father, who was in the entertainment business, knew Ferree wanted to become an actor and he questioned him on it.

“He said, ‘Yeah, but acting sucks,’” Ferree recalls. “Your songs are good. You should do that.’”

He found Washington D.C. and began bar backing at the venerable Black Cat rock club. It wasn’t anything that club did for him – as impressionable as it might be – but the nation’s capital itself that helped shape the wondrous brilliance of one of the year’s finest indie albums. Happy hands are in the air on album opener “In The Countryside,” there’s a luminescence to the hushed romance of Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings, a quadroon slave that our third president disputably fathered multiple children with, in “Private Honeymoon” and there’s Dylan and The Zombies tickles in multiple spots on the album. Ferree is great at delivering a veiled message as most of Leaving the Nest was brought into his mind through obscure channels. One of his neighbors got evicted and he left his parents’ entire history out on the curb – didn’t want it anymore. Ferree collected some of it. He still has the father’s razor and the mother’s coupon collection from the 1940s. He’s got the man’s driver’s license that says “Negro” on it. He began thinking of these people when he wrote.

“I started to believe in ghosts,” he said. “My girlfriend and I, we would take these romantic strolls around Arlington National Cemetery. We would walk around there for hours. I would go a bit apeshit on the Civil War and the ghosts would start to come out. So many amazing people have called this place home. I became obsessed on how cycles repeat themselves.

“This record isn’t at all about 9/11, but after the second tower got hit, I remember riding my bike to the Pentagon and just looking at it, I realized that something bigger was going on. The record’s not about that, really. It’s more about if everyone got wiped off the face of the map and just a couple people survived. It’s their trying to survive in a smoky world.”

Benjy Ferree
Domino Records