“It’s kind of a quarter-life crisis situation,” says Benjamin Booker when discussing the inspiration behind his new sophomore album, Witness. “Part of it was deciding how I was going to fit in to what’s happening now in this country.”

Coming off the success of his 2014 self-titled debut album and subsequent tour, Booker hit a patch of writer’s block after returning to New Orleans, where the singer-songwriter and guitarist had developed and honed his unique, bluesy-punk style. An impromptu jaunt south of the border ended up being just the trick to rekindle Booker’s creative flame.

“I was feeling a little claustrophobic in New Orleans,” he says. “So, I got a last-minute ticket to Mexico City. On the flight over, I was reading this Don DeLillo book called White Noise, and there’s a quote that I read: ‘What we are reluctant to touch often seems the very fabric of our salvation.’”

Inspired by this sentiment, Booker immediately began an itemized list of some of the issues he struggled with personally, an introspective inventory for the problems he needed to face. Each of those bullet points became a seed for one of the 10 tracks that make up Witness.

---

“It’s an album of those things that I was reluctant to touch, things that I had a hard time talking about before,” Booker says. “Everybody has those things about themselves that they don’t want to come to terms with. The last record I made—a lot of it was about my relationships [with] other people. With this album, I was trying to look at the problems with myself and go more inward.”

The Mexico trip brought on a wider worldview for Booker. Spending time writing in a foreign country—with headlines bringing news of social strife in the U.S.—the musician first found peace in being
able to turn away, yet ultimately found himself unable to ignore what was happening back home.

“I was having a hard time with that, seeing the world crumbling around you and being like, ‘Oh, now what am I gonna do?’” Booker says. “But in order to get there and start doing work, I needed to do some work on myself first. ‘Witness’ came out of that kind of thing.”

Booker is referring to the title track from the new album, the politically charged, gospel-tinged lead single featuring gravitas-laden vocal support from Mavis Staples. The song’s verses speak to the much-publicized incidents of recent police brutality toward minorities, while its chorus brings up the notion of turning yourself from “just a witness” to someone who bears witness and speaks out.

“When Trayvon Martin was murdered—about an hour and a half away from me when I was in college—and I saw the picture on the news, the kid in the hoodie, I was just like, ‘Oh, fuck, that could have easily been me,’” Booker says. “People have a hard time getting involved in problems if they don’t see themselves in them, and that was the first time I saw myself in it, as a target. When you’re a kid in college, just going to school and stuff, you feel like you’re on the right track; probably nothing’s going to happen to this kid. Then, at that moment, it was like, ‘Oh wow—any time.’”

While the song “Witness” was aimed against external forces, most of the album, Booker says, is much more of an internal reflection: though he admits that even when a songwriter tries to look inward, the resulting music can end up being surprisingly universal in its themes.

“There’s a song called ‘Believe’ on the album that I wrote because I was in this pretty dark period where I felt like somebody who didn’t believe in anything, who just really couldn’t get behind anything,” Booker says. “I wrote a song about wanting to fit in and be a part of something bigger, a larger family. Especially with the last election—Trump and the idea of these people who are living on the outskirts wanting to have their voice heard, which was promised to them by the president—I think that ended up showing up more in the song than I realized when I was writing it.”

At least with his music, Booker has come to embrace his outsider role—and he has quickly grown into something of an alternative hero. Moving from Florida to New Orleans post-college and starting to perform his songs at neighborhood clubs for local audiences, he found a group of music lovers who were more than willing to accept a unique voice. And while he recently moved to California for a change of pace, Booker will always be grateful for the Crescent City family that took him in.

“It’s nice [in New Orleans], because there isn’t pressure to do anything in particular to sound a certain way, or to look a certain way,” Booker says. “So a lot of bands there are just very unique, and themselves. If you’re an artist starting out, it’s an amazing place to go because of that. If I had started off trying to do gospel-punk music or that kind of stuff in another town, I probably would have gotten discouraged really fast, but people there were accepting of this weird kid.”