Benjamin Warren
Ben Warren (Born 8 May 1972) is a folk rock singer-songwriter. Warren is best known for his 12 bar blues cover of the Eric B. and Rakim hit song "Microphone Fiend" and an original piece entitled "My Oppressor", which is now the closing credits song for the independent movie “Body/Antibody”. A video set to his song "Famous" was conceived and directed by Matthew Glasson. His work has also been featured on the “Crankfarm” podcast show.
Most of Warren's songs focus on loss and attraction, "music business" topics such as a man who is selling out and becoming a self-promoter, a strange loner who dreams “sailing ships over the Red Sea” with his nemesis, his girlfriend the “Broken Girl”, and the dangers of abusive Stepmother’s “Bouncer of Woolworth.” They generally feature Warren's characteristic whispery vocals accompanied by guitar, drums, and occasionally synths, bass, drum machine, acoustic guitars, or distorted piano.
Discography
For Ben Warren’s full discography, including tracklistings, see Ben Warren discography.
- Famous
- Manifest Destiny
- Dead At Disneyland
- C tHe Deuce (in production)
Many of Warren’s songs are published on his website as MP3 downloads. Many of them are free, and none of them are subject to digital rights management. All of his original songs fall under the Creative Commons Attribution NonCommercial ShareAlike 2.5 License.
He received a good deal of attention for his blues 3 part harmony cover of the Eric B. and Rakim hit “Microphone Fiend”.
Secondary Creativity
A notable aspect of Warren’s approach to being an internet-based professional performing artist is the manner in which he has engaged a small but loyal group of fans who actively participate in promoting him. Since Ben Warren uses Creative Commons for licensing, others are free to use his songs in their own works. As a result, a number of music videos have been created using his songs. There are also videos in the style of Warren's Flickr which use Creative Commons licensed photographs from Flickr as a slideshow accompaniment to the song.
In addition to the multiple videos, the Creative Commons license has also allowed illustrations to be done of Warren's work. Most notably is the work by Magician/illustrator Marco Frezza, who drew a visual interpretation of several Every Other Day Jams.
Every Other Day Jam
"Every Other Day Jam" is the name that Warren gave to a creative experiment which ran throughout much of July and all of August 2007. In this project, Warren undertook to release 15 original musical pieces in the course of a month. This target was achieved. The objectives were: (a) to push through the artist's creative threshold by using what Warren describes as a "masochistic approach to writing and recording… a new song conceived, written, produced and recorded in 48 hours"; (b) to prove to himself and the world that he was capable of producing creative output on a deadline. Early indications are that the experiment succeeded in generating a large number of high quality songs, and expanding Warren's internet presence and enlarging his fan base. The success of the monetary objective is more difficult to judge, but Warren was quoted in a Late August 2007 interview as stating that “I’m still broke and have to work as a telemarketer 4 hours a day but I’m happy."