Ben's Brother - A biography
Perhaps it's only fitting that Jamie Hartman's London-based band, Ben's Brother, first turned stateside heads in a television ad. Hartman was actually introduced to one of his biggest influences in the same way. "There was a Levi's ad in the UK," he says. "That was when I heard Sam Cooke for the first time."
So when the Ben's Brother song "Stuttering" provided the soundtrack for a Dentyne Ice commercial, going on to sell 3,500 copies in its first week as a digital single, in a way, it was just Hartman's earlier life being repeated. And digital single buyers have one advantage Hartman didn't: "I had Sam Cooke, The Man And His Music on LP," he recalls, "but I wore it out and had to buy another copy."
As for the name, Jamie Hartman is, literally, the younger brother of Ben, a former cricket star. The band's debut, Beta Male Fairytales, reflects Jamie's wrestling with his place as a middle son of three. But the band's name was less one that was chosen, and more one that stuck.
"Ben moved down to South Africa to teach cricket for six months and took a CD copy of my demos with him," Hartman says. "When he was down there he played this CD for a few people and they asked for copies of it. So it ended up getting copied a lot around Cape Town. They didn't know my name - he didn't even bother telling them. So all they knew was that it was Ben's brother's band. I eventually met some of those people, and they all knew me as Ben's brother. That had been the case through school, anyway. If you're two or three years younger than your brother and you go to the same school they all say, 'oh yeah, of course, I know Ben's brother.'"
At 16, overshadowed by his more athletic older brother, Hartman arrived at music in search of an outlet, writing songs on the piano as soon as he began playing it. His first performance was for a teenage crush. She wasn't impressed, but her friend was, and Hartman soon began dating her as a result. "My voice was terrible and so was the song but it really didn't matter," he recalls. "It felt good."
As a young adult, Hartman tried to get away from music, working a series of jobs - including one in a bank - but nearly drank himself to death from sheer boredom. So he formed bands, and even worked as a Notting Hill street performer for extra cash, playing covers of Oasis and other popular artists on Portobello Road while learning to project his unmistakably raspy voice. "I found I could make the equivalent of 50 to 60 pounds an hour doing that for a couple of hours. That was my main means of earning a living for a while."
Later, Hartman fell in with a group of fellow songwriters and began improving his craft while learning to write with others. "It was a real eye-opener for me. I realized how many talented people there are, and how many different types of music and how many great writing styles there are, and how much you can get from listening. I got my first couple of cuts immediately from that. So I just thought, 'well, if I can't be an artist right now, I can at least write for other people.'"
Eventually Hartman ended up in New York, writing advertising jingles and songs while recording demos during studio downtime. "New York taught me so much," he says. "It was so much more make-or-break than anything I'd ever experienced before. You can be broke in London and find your way through. But in New York, if you're not earning a living people just kick you out and say, 'thank you very much.' I had to learn quickly."
As an artist, Hartman's journey is as old as the music industry, dotted with former behind-the-scenes hit songwriters - everyone from Isaac Hayes to Willie Nelson - who've stepped up to become artists. Like Hayes in Memphis and Nelson in Nashville, Hartman labored for years, in both London and New York, writing songs for others - everyone from Spice Girl Emma Bunton to Natalie Imbruglia.
Ironically, it was his biggest songwriting success, penning the #3 UK single "All Time Love" for Will Young, that convinced him to put himself in the spotlight. "I was very proud of it," he recalls. "However, I knew, as soon as I heard it on the radio, that it wasn't enough for me to be a writer. Yeah, it's great, but it's not going to give me the ultimate satisfaction of standing on stage with my band performing in front of thousands of people."
So Hartman assembled a band with extraordinary chemistry, beginning with multi-instrumentalist Kiris Houston, with whom he performed low-key duo shows, and began taking his soulful anthems to the masses. "I've played in a lot of bands over the years," Houston says. "And you could immediately tell when we all started playing together it was a really rare thing, where you play the first song the first time and it sounds great."
The sound of Beta Male Fairytales has already turned heads in the UK, with single "Let Me Out" landing in rotation at BBC Radio Two and with the band winning favorable notices in Q, The Sunday Times and the Daily Mail, which called the band "The Next Big Thing."
Hartman's songs often take their cues from trials or setbacks. "Bad Dream" is about his mother's survival of a near-fatal car wreck, while "Carry On" is inspired by the July 7, 2005 terrorist bombings of London Underground trains. But while deeply personal, Hartman's songs nonetheless touch a universally uplifting chord. "It's a hopeful album as opposed to a depressing album," he observes. "It's about getting through it, as opposed to always feeling trapped."
Given Hartman's influences - from old-school jazz and soul like Billie Holiday, Sam Cooke and Otis Redding, to the unavoidable British pop of The Beatles on through to Radiohead - and with his Rod Stewart-esque voice, Ben's Brother sounds like nothing else. Hartman draws a blank when asked if there's a "movement" he claims membership in. "I wasn't listening to anybody else and going, 'that's great, why don't we do that?'"
It's undoubtedly this unique sound that has elicited such a response to the band's TV ad-enabled U.S. debut. And Hartman says that's fine with him: "I don't really care how the breakthrough comes. Being in my thirties, I know how hard it is to break through in any way these days, and find a medium for people to hear your stuff."
And who knows, perhaps the next great artist is now discovering Ben's Brother in the same way that Jamie Hartman once discovered Sam Cooke.
Ben's Brother is Hartman, Kiris Houston (keyboards/guitar), Dan McKinna (bass), Dave Hattee (drums) and Tim Vanderkuil (guitar).