Ben Sollee

Kentucky musician and composer Ben Sollee, has been bending boundaries with his musical style and career for nearly two decades – his latest album, Long Haul (2024) is no exception. Drawing on tonal influences from both the American and Global South, Sollee melds the sounds of Appalachia, Muscle Shoals, Polynesia, and West Africa in his first solo release in seven years. Sollee’s vocals and unique cello style threaded through each track are the album’s binding, bringing together otherwise seemingly disparate chapters of this journey – the Long Haul.

Since his last album in 2017, Kentucky Native, Sollee intentionally took time away from touring to grow his family and strengthen his community connections. In order to keep closer to home with his young family, Sollee leaned into his work as a composer scoring films such as LAND from director Robin Wright, and Maggie Morre(s), a John Slattery film featuring Tina Fey and Jon Hamm. He recently signed with Evolution Music Partners as a composer, scored the Peabody nominated podcast, Unreformed, and continues to score documentaries, primarily focused on environmental issues. In 2019, Sollee dug deeper into his activism (previously with Oxfam America, The Nature Conservancy and Patagonia) by helping to launch the non-profit organization Canopy, which supports Kentucky businesses positively impacting their communities and our planet.

In the midst of expanding as a composer and fleshing out his Kentucky roots, Sollee found himself having to make a more difficult choice towards growth – as a way to move forward out of grief. Like so many of us, the COVID-19 pandemic years, which he refers to as “the great pause” brought loss and grief to Sollee. The deaths of his father, a mentor, and then a dear friend while working on this album presented Sollee with what he eventually chose to see as opportunities for growth and reflection. This gives the record a sense of buoyancy, a feeling of rising out of a depth, seven years coming.

The title track “Long Haul” tells the story of Sollee’s health journey with long-COVID. The lyrics, however, paint in such broad strokes, that anyone who’s been forced – for whatever reason – to shift in relationship to their body, can relate. He sings “I didn’t know how rich I was until this poverty,” lilting up to a high note letting us know he’s embraced and grown from the experience. “I realized I had a very exploitative relationship with my body and creativity,” Says Sollee “I realized the most radical thing you can do is to care for yourself; not in some optimized, individualistic way, but as an aspect of nature, as an aspect of society for which I want justice.” Serving as the album’s title, “Long Haul” takes on a more universal meaning acknowledging that Sollee and his cello are just one aspect of a greater environmental, societal and cultural haul we are all on together.

As an artist in an era of generative technology, Sollee wanted this album to have evidence of human touch. Working on the record, he repeated a mantra to himself, “show our fingerprints,” which meant making sure listeners could hear the breath behind the woodwinds or the choir, and the patting of the fingers on the drumheads. Sollee builds a sonic landscape of rolling hills and winding roads through a commitment to hand percussion on this record. Because spiral patterns come naturally to the human hand, says Sollee, the cajón and djembe grooves give a feeling of forward momentum and travel to the album. This traveling groove comes through on key songs like “Misty Miles”, “Under the Spell” and “One More Day.”

Striving to be present while coexisting with consumerism is a theme explored throughout the record that comes through in the choruses of “Misty Miles” and “Under the Spell”. Asking “When will enough be enough?” And “What is this dream I’m dreaming?”, respectively. He sings these questions with the smooth cadence of a bicycle, and uses juxtaposing imagery of shopping malls and “misty miles along the southwest coast, Spanish moss hanging from the crooked live oaks.”

Both of these songs give an honest description of how Sollee relates to his work, accomplishments, family and community. “I’m constantly trying to let go of all of these ambitions and desires and just be present with my family, to be present with nature…and to be present where I am with my own place in life.”

While many of the Long Haul songs ask questions, the track “One More Day ” makes a plea. “It’s a love letter,” Sollee explains “My greatest hope for this song is that it’s a tool…It’s a rallying cry for people to give it one more day.” In Feburary of 2023, Sollee lost his long-time musical brother and close friend, Jordon Ellis to suicide. The two created, recorded and toured together since 2009. The idea for “One More Day” came to Sollee as he walked through the Louisville airport for the first time without his musical brother and travel companion. In his words, “I realized, no matter where I went, he was going to be there…pretty much every airport that I travel through, I’ve walked through with him.” The lyrics rich with descriptive imagery of their travels together ride the song’s distinct percussive groove, “a strange groove” as Sollee describes it. It was inspired by free-range jams on and off stage with Ellis that explored Tejano, Soca, and Caribbean musical influences, full of buoyancy and joy.

With Ellis as his percussive and collaborative keystone for well over a decade, Sollee found himself creatively adrift after his passing. But over time, viewed it as an opportunity to collaborate with others, honoring Ellis by not replacing him. This, and Sollee’s desire to bring hand-percussion to the album led him to multi-instramentalist, Patrick Duke Graney.

Other partners on the album include Jason Clayborn and the Atmosphere Changers, the choir heard on several tracks, and Stuart Bogie who arranged and performed the winds and horns. Bassist Alana Rocklin, and multi-instrumentalist Brandon Coleman are also heard on the record. Ceirra Evans painted the album cover art. The cover shows a man walking on a winding path through the woods. The image is full of movement and spiral patterns, similar to the record, with the man distinctly in the middle of his journey – constantly arriving, but not yet finishing – on a long haul.