photo by: Brian Kelly

Ember has been out for a year-and-half now, you are about halfway through an extensive summer headlining tour, how are you? What’s the vibe within Breaking Benjamin?

Everything is great. We are really grateful for our fans and people that support rock music in general. We love doing what we are doing and hopefully with a tour like this we can get a couple new fans. Everything we are and everything we do is a product of the people that allow us to do it. We’d all still make music, but to share it is the best thing an artist can ask for. I have people come up to me and tell me what songs mean to them. It means a lot that they relate to me. I personally get the enjoyment that they get out of it by them telling me what it means to them. To be out on tour and see that every day is amazing.

That’s something I’ve noticed in the past 15 years of Breaking Benjamin – how much your music impacts the lives of your greater community. You are so honest with what you write and sing about and the fans in turn, connect deeply and relate to the messages in their own way. Does it ever feel like you are a captain of a very large team?

Yeah, I think it’s really just the human element. We all go through things in our own way. Everybody’s worst thing is the worst thing to them and everybody’s best thing is the best thing to them. What’s cool about music, no matter how different everybody’s worst and best thing is, the one commonality is that they get all the feeling that relates to them through music – that also relates to me, and it connects us.

For me, it is the song “Had Enough”, it simply lit a fire. Or something more subtle like how you deliver the lyric “Something’s just about to break” in “Diary of Jane”.

Everybody has a breaking point. That’s something very important to me – you can have something really amazing on paper, but if you don’t deliver it in the right way it doesn’t translate. That’s what’s awesome about music, it’s not just what you are saying, but how you say it and the emotion behind it. There are a lot of singers out there that have incredible lyrics, but they just talk them without any power behind them. People still attach to that, but I try to do both. I learned that from Kurt Cobain, the band Cold and Korn. Some artists can just say one and word it can move you just by how they sang it. Kurt Cobain was the best at that. It’s fascinating to recognize how real that is. That’s all you can do as an artist, just try to be real. I used to be shy, but now I like to go out and touch people and make it personal. Before, I used to try and go on stage and be perfect. Now, it’s not about that. It’s about being human and actually connecting with people.

Many of your records, Ember included, have an opening interlude and then a closing as the last song. It drives home the point how cohesive the record is and how much of an overall story there is to it as opposed to a bunch of individual songs and singles.

A lot of time gets put into arranging the proper order of the songs. Each song has it’s own story and then you can combine it all and it all makes sense if you listen to it from front to back. That’s what we’ve been going for. We don’t just throw the songs on. We think deeply about what should come next and how they flow into each other. When we get it right, we then book-end it. What’s interesting is that both the intro and outro come last.

It can be easier in this day and age of singles and streaming to just pick your spots, but what’s fascinating is as a listener you are thoroughly rewarded if you take it in as a complete record.

Yeah, we do some hidden things that we get to try and see if other people get it. And it’s totally fine if they don’t. If they just like one song that’s cool, too. Then you do have the people that are so into all of it and figure it all out.