Spotlight: Alec Benjamin
photo credit: @connortherealgaskey
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Alec Benjamin has deceptively big dreams.
The 28-year-old, Arizona-born singer-songwriter wants to write for the summer campfire canon. He wants to write pop songs with lyrics that everyone knows—tunes that beg you to sing along, your arms around your neighbor. Alec Benjamin wants to write his own “Hallelujah.”
The summers Benjamin spent at a Jewish sleepaway camp as a child opened him up to a whole new musical world— one full of simple campfire songs that were timeless, lyrical, beloved, catchy and utterly relatable.
“I’m not sure I’ll ever write a ‘Hallelujah,’” he laughs, while calling from his mom’s basement in late March, where he’s currently holed up while sick. “There’s a reason they don’t change the camp book every year; there’s a shortage of songs like that. But that’s what keeps me writing.”
In the meantime, though, Benjamin has quietly become a massive pop star in a way that wasn’t possible just a few years ago—he’s collaborated with John Mayer and played Coachella—thanks to social media, which has allowed this shy, impressively genuine and vulnerable guy to invite strangers right into his life.
It’s paid off in spades: His 2018 breakout single “Let Me Down Slowly” has racked up a billion streams on Spotify alone. A handful of other tunes have been streamed hundreds of millions of times. Nearly five million people subscribe to his YouTube channel, tuning in not only for official music videos but also for bedroom clips he shot at his parent’s house. In his music and in his still-humble lifestyle, Benjamin is nothing if not relatable.
On his third LP, (Un)Commentary, Benjamin explores the human condition with a stronger magnifying glass than ever before— writing freakishly catchy, slyly intelligent pop songs that tap into something far deeper than your average radio hits. He wrote these 13 tunes in early 2021, when the COVID-19 pandemic was keeping everyone locked away at home, and he—like everyone else— had nothing else to do but watch the world fall apart.
“I love to people-watch. I love to just sit on a bench and watch people live their lives,” he says. “I wasn’t sitting outside watching but, still, I just watched. I realized, when you put humanity in a crazy position, human nature is on full display. And this album is full of my observations.”
For Benjamin, (Un) Commentary feels far more like a moment in time than his first two albums. His songwriting process for 2018’s Narrated for You and 2020’s These Two Windows was incredibly fluid. Benjamin admits that he was perpetually writing numbers that felt better than what he’d already recorded—editing and replacing them until the tracklistings felt final. But, he explains, (Un)Commentary speaks to a particular time in his life—in all of our lives, really.
“In the past, my writing has been like an endless airport walkway, and I’m exhausted and I wanna get off this thing. But it just kept going; those albums really blend together for me, and the songs just kept coming,” he says. “But this one is a small section of that airport walkway—we take a brisk walk and, once we’re on the other side, we don’t look back. If I step on a new section of the walkway, then that’ll be a new section of my life—for a new album—no matter how catchy a new song might be.”
The songs on (Un)Commentary feel more delicate and nuanced than anything he’s created before—with a hopeful philosophical bent.
On the sweeping “Hammers,” Benjamin wonders, “If hammers can crush, if hammers can bend/ Then how do you plan to use your hammer, my friend?/ Wield your hammer like weapons drawn, or/ Wield your hammer to right what’s wrong.”
Benjamin grew up a precocious and curious teen, perpetually asking, “But why not me?” With summer-camp inspiration still fueling him, he began using high-school study halls to look up the production credits to his favorite albums on Wikipedia, then emailing all those songwriters.
“Wikipedia is a reliable source,” he says with a laugh. “I just hit up these songwriters that I admired. I emailed Dan Wilson for four years; I emailed him enough times that his manager said, ‘Please stop.’ I was afraid no one would ever respond, but I knew that was the worst that could happen.”
Reality rolled out as much the opposite: After years of email, Wilson did reply. The frontman of ‘90s pop-rock act Semisonic— and current songwriting superstar—connected with Benjamin, and they began collaborating. Two sensitive souls, they’re responsible for some of Benjamin’s most beloved compositions.
The relationship between a singer and his writing partners often comes down to role clarity—not every session plays out as writers trading lines. For Benjamin, a singer whose speech and songwriting are both lightning-fast, “the message of the song has to come from me, or else it doesn’t feel authentic.”
He adds, “But what I need are people in the room who can edit these ideas in real-time. I’m super self-conscious, and very anxious. But there’s no ego in it for me. I want the best ideas to win and form the song.”
He describes the sessions with Wilson as “a conversation where we sit down with a guitar and piano and just write what’s in my heart.”
Whether any of these 13 songs enter the campfire cannon remains to be seen— but the ingredients are there. The ever-prolific Benjamin feels ready to find out, and keep writing either way, constantly searching for the perfect pop song.
“If kids learn my songs in preschool or summer camp one day…” he says, before trailing off. “Well, then we’ll know.”
