Ben Sollee answers the phone but isn’t ready to chat. He’s still talking to his son, Oliver, and his mom. They’re in the car, “cruising down the road.”
Turns out this is typical of Sollee, who’ll play The Southern Café and Music Hall on April 8. Scattered might not be the right word, but he certainly marches to his own beat and is constantly working on multiple projects.
Take his newest brainchild, The Vanishing Point, a virtual reality app that’s designed to work with Google Cardboard. You start it up, look into the binocular-like device and begin your interactive journey, running full steam ahead in a Lawnmower Man-like post-apocalyptic dreamscape.
It’s all set to Sollee’s music, with dizzying cello riffs helping tell the story as graphical elements reveal themselves. Sollee calls the first version of the app “a proving ground.” He admits the revenues aren’t there from it yet but likes its prospects, as have several other musicians, including Björk.
“The risk of being a musician on the road and that being your only point of revenue—those are the pressures that push on me,” Sollee says. “So I continue to diversify. Immersive 3-D and augmented reality really interest me. As an acoustic musician, that’s how I experience music—in the round. Records for me have been like trying to stuff a suitcase that’s too small.”
Sollee has found a way to stuff that case time and again. He’s released five full-length records since 2008, a time at which he was also playing and touring with Abigail Washburn and The Sparrow Quartet. (The group also includes Bela Fleck.) He’s dropped two EPs and a live record. He’s in the process of releasing a sixth LP, Steeples, in three parts, a strategy he hopes will expand the ever-diminishing shelf life of modern records.
“I’m having fun with it,” Sollee says. “The life cycle of records is incredibly short. We’re starting to get into insect life cycles, and something is considered new for a very brief time. Part of spreading out the release is the opportunity to spread our impact out.”
Sollee likens the effect to that of the popular Serial podcast, which has an unconventional storytelling format. He also recognizes the financial difficulties that come along with the release, but he hopes it’ll be worth it.
“If you’re not going to make much money releasing a physical record anyway, why continue with the traditional format?” he asks. “We’re experimenting just to see if it makes the value of the record actually justify the cost.”
Experimenting is something Sollee is comfortable with. Having learned the cello while attending a well-regarded arts high school in Lexington, Kentucky, he’s since taken his classical training and turned it into something altogether different. He constantly finds new ways to make sounds on the cello, fingerpicking it as often as he strums it with a bow.
When he visits Charlottesville, Sollee will be traveling with a traditional trio, his preferred onstage instrumentation. But he’s shifted among a number of bandmates over the years, trading out a bass player here, a drummer there and going through several multi-instrumentalists. His shows feature lots of improvisation along with established tracks.
“The show will be full of stories, not a composed, highly rehearsed delivery of a set performance,” he says. “For me, it’s an interactive experience.”
Although Sollee previously played cello, mandolin and guitar during performances, he now sticks to the cello. He thinks he can get more out of it than the others.
“I feel like the cello is the great Swiss Army knife of the orchestra,” he says. “It has incredible melodic range, and its harmonic capabilities are unequalled. It can be rhythmic. Composers have used it for all those things for years. I’m just expanding on that.”
Sollee has also had a special place in his heart for theater since high school, and he’s found a number of ways to exercise that affinity. He’s written the score for multiple indie films and is currently working on an interactive stage performance of the children’s book Harold and the Purple Crayon.
“I’ve always had a huge interest in dance and onstage performance,” Sollee says. “I was involved on the tech side [since high school], and I can walk into a theater and connect with the tech staff because I have the theater language and vernacular.”
One of the songs Sollee’s most known for is, ironically, a rant against stage theatrics. He was playing Bonnaroo in 2008 when Kanye West threw a characteristic tantrum. A late-running show had delayed West’s crew in setting up, and the crowd was frenzied by the time he went on. West was none too happy—and made it clear.
The next day, Sollee wrote a song, “Dear Kanye,” that he never intended to release. But someone on his management team leaked it. “Dear Kanye…You don’t need a light show / Just good flows,” Sollee sings quietly over spare cello.
Fans went nuts, but Sollee wasn’t happy. He played the song a few times live but has since given it up.
“I’ll never play it again because…giving any attention to Kanye’s outlandish behavior, whether positive or negative, enables him to continue acting that way,” Sollee says. “And I feel, if you have heard your Kanye, he has so much to give as an artist.”
It takes one to know one.
Ben Sollee
The Southern Café and Music Hall
April 8
Listen, here.