Ben of A Place for Owls, a Denver emo band, joined KGNU’s Indra Raj for a studio session. He discussed the band’s latest release, How We Dig in the Earth, and played a few songs. Ben highlighted the value of creating music within a community and the importance of pursuing creative passions regardless of age or professional status (Interview date: 12/9/2024)
Indra Raj: I have Ben from A Place for Owls here in the studio with me. I just have to say publicly, we’ve been trying to schedule this for a really long time. Thank you for being so flexible and for being here. It’s really great to meet you and you have a new album out.
A Place for Owls: We do, yeah.
Indra Raj: Which came out in early November.
A Place for Owls: That’s right.
Indra Raj: So we’ll talk about that. We’ll talk about some of the things coming down the line and the backstory. But first of all, let’s hear some music.
A Place for Owls: Let’s do it. This is a song called “I’m Not Sure”.
Indra Raj: You are listening to A Place for Owls live here in the KGNU studios on the Afternoon Sound Alternative. We have Ben in the studio. Thanks, Ben.
A Place for Owls: Yeah, thank you.
Indra Raj: It’s so great to hear your music in this kind of stripped down version. Your latest album is called How We Dig in the Earth. It came out on November 1st. I want to hear about the album, but first I would love to hear about how this whole project came to be. Where it started, where it’s going, and everything in between.
A Place for Owls: A Place for Owls is four of my best friends. So we just knew each other from life. We’re all, roughly, in our thirties. This is the seventh or eighth band for most of us. We had given up on ever making a go at music or ever seeing any traction with music. We had a bunch of bands in the emo and punk world from back in the 2000s.
We were like, let’s just write songs for the love of the game. So we recorded and self released an album in 2022. We expected only our wives and our moms to listen and like it. Then we started getting a little bit of notice online and in the local Denver/Boulder scene.
We have been pleased that other people enjoy the music as well. We actually got enough money and traction from playing shows to record at a professional studio for this second record, How We Dig in the Earth. Everything is a gift if you expect that we’re just gonna be nobodies who keep playing music to nobody. Then anybody that pays attention is a joy and a gift, right?
Indra Raj: Yeah, absolutely. I love the humble roots of it all. And that’s such a great message, I think, for anyone out there listening who might be an artist or a musician. It doesn’t matter if you’re 10 years old or if you’re 90 years old. If you want to do it, the best time to start is now.
A Place for Owls: Yeah. I think a lot about J.R.R. Tolkien, who wrote The Lord of the Rings. He was 60 years old when those books were published. He wrote them for his entire life, basically. Then he finally got them published when he was in his 60s. It wasn’t a hit until he was in his 70s. So he only had maybe 10 years of notoriety. It’s my favorite book series. It’s never too late to do the creative work that you are called to do, right?
Indra Raj: Absolutely. What a great message. I was reading on your website. It feels very in line with KGNU’s ethos too. “Making and sharing art with your own community and disaffirming the inherent value of things created by ‘non-professionals’” and how empowering that is for people who want to do something, but maybe they don’t have a master’s degree. You can still do it.
A Place for Owls: Yes, absolutely. And it’s not just music stuff. It’s any creative work. If you rewind culture 100, 150 years, how did you experience music? It’s because someone you knew and you were in a real room with was creating it. And now, we think about music as something that’s only for the blessed, chosen few. We’re constantly comparing our voices to the best in recorded music. But if you rewind 150, 200 years or whatever, you would have a friendly rivalry with the other guy that played guitar in your town. And you would be spurning each other on to get better at the instrument, and you’d be singing together in groups of people.
So I think part of our hope is that we reclaim some of that communal spirit. And also all of the solutions to almost every big problem that I’ve had has been other people. Being able to get close again to people, in a room full of people singing or playing music or whatever, you’re also going to find that your depression and anxiety gets better. Your financial troubles that you’re going through, there’s people there that’ll help you out with that. It’s all in line for us. If we just get close to each other again, life’s better, right?
Indra Raj: Totally. It’s so wild when you think about the fact that recorded music has actually not been around for that long in terms of the context of human history. It wasn’t always comparing yourself to the biggest top 40 artists. There’s so many good things about technology and how it’s allowed us to connect, but also, exploring that other side of the coin. How has it divorced us from the communities that we live in a little bit more than we want?
A Place for Owls: Yeah, 100%. Our music is very much in the emo and punk and folk tradition. And that’s always basement shows of 20 to 60 kids or whatever. Trying to get some of that spirit back, I think, it’s not the solution to every problem in the world, but it’s a solution to a lot of the problems that I have, at least.
Indra Raj: It doesn’t need to be a huge community, it just needs to be people who care.
Alright, we are here in the studio with Ben from A Place for Owls, a local Denver band. They have a new album called How We Dig in the Earth. Let’s hear a couple more songs.
A Place for Owls: Cool. This one’s “Deliberate Practice”.
Indra Raj: Great to hear those songs. Are those off of the new album?
A Place for Owls: Those were all older ones. I tried to pick songs that would actually translate to acoustic. I’ll play one from the new record, but the new record is mostly twinkly emo stuff. Which works in a full band context, but then sometimes falls a little flat when you’re just solo acoustic.
Indra Raj: Yeah. we don’t all have to be one thing.
A Place for Owls: That’s right.
Indra Raj: Tell me a little bit about the making of this album and where some of these other influences come into the whole musical picture for you.
A Place for Owls: It’s the cliche of “make the song that you want to listen to”, right? The stuff that I grew up listening to was a lot of early 2000s and late 90s emo bands. A lot of Get Up Kids, American Football, Jimmy Eat World, The Promise Ring, that sort of stuff. Anybody that was like, wearing their emotions on their sleeve, turning their amp up to 11 was basically what I listened to.
So I tried to make heavier music in my youth. I just found myself returning to the sort of Bob Dylan records that my dad gave me when I first got a turntable when I was 20 years old. Especially the older that I got, being in my thirties, it was like, oh, I’m in a gentler place. And I’ve got tinnitus from going to a bunch of loud rock shows. So folk music isa center for me and for us too. We try to make songs that are beautiful and work if you strip it down to just the melody and the lyrics. You could dress it up as a folk song or you could dress it up as a rock song, like an indie rock song, right?
We’re funny. We call ourselves an emo band, but really it’s like Death Cab for Cutie style indie rock. Just contemplative, melancholic lyrics, melodies. We occasionally let ourselves be loud, but mostly we’re just being beautiful.
Indra Raj: There is that delicate dance between what you’re doing at home versus what translates well on stage and things like that. You guys just had a sold out show at the Skylark in Denver, which is amazing.
A Place for Owls: Thank you.
Indra Raj: How did that go?
A Place for Owls: It was beautiful. Skylark is one of my favorite small to mid sized rooms in town. Shout out to Nathaniel Rateliff, who owns the Skylark. He does a lot for the community. The glasses that I’m wearing right now were free as a result of a health and services day that Rateliff’s non profit put on at the Skylark like two months ago. It was like, just show up, get an eye exam, get a free pair of glasses, get an ear exam, get a massage.
He’s a hero. I’ve met him once, but I just get the sense that he and his whole crew are actually legitimately trying to make the world a better place, putting their money where their mouth is, as far as communal action and mutual aid, that sort of stuff.
Playing at the Skylark is always a little bit fun just because of that Rateliff connection. But we played with a couple wonderful Denver bands that we really love. Corsicana, which is this dream pop project run by my friend Ben, who’s just so beautiful.
And then a newer band called INS which is a new project of a couple Denver music scene guys, Adam England and Jordan Lucas. Slightly more psychedelic war on drugs is the vibe. It was a good mix, a great night, and the staff at the Skylark are just so sweet, so it was a beautiful thing.
Indra Raj: That’s awesome. I’ll have to check out INS for KGNU. We love to support local artists here, and Nathaniel Rateliff has been really supportive of KGNU over the years too.
That’s really awesome. You guys have a show coming up. Let’s talk a little bit about that.
A Place for Owls: It’s not announced yet, but I’ll spill the beans. We’re playing at the Marquis in Denver on January 31st. We’re playing with another self described Denver emo band called Broken Records. It’s like if Jimmy Eat World listened to The Cure a bunch. But they’re very sweet people, same sort of values. So we’re playing at the Marquis with Broken Record on January 31st. Not announced yet, so no one can get tickets, but follow us at A Place for Owls on Instagram, and you can check it out there.
Indra Raj: That’s so great. I haven’t thought about Jimmy Eat World in a very long time. They had a couple big singles on the radio when I was in high school.
A Place for Owls: “The Middle” was the biggest one.
Indra Raj: Correct me if I’m wrong, their actual vibe is a little different from that pop sound.
A Place for Owls: I’m actually an amateur Jimmy Eat World historian. They’re one of my favorite bands. So you’re asking the right person. They basically came from the emo and punk scene. They did a really beautiful sort of chamber emo record called Clarity, which had the song “Lucky Denver Mint” and a few other ones. A really lush sound that was on Capitol Records. They were signed to a major label and then they got dropped. They got screwed over by their label. Then they were reinventing themselves. The label said there’s no hits on this, so we’re just going to write hits, and that’s when they wrote the album Bleed American, which had “The Middle” and their poppiest songs. It was a flex on their part, to just be like, you don’t think that we’re a radio rock band? We’re gonna have an MTV hit. And they did.
Then they became, for a while at least, one of the biggest bands in the world. They ran through and they toured with Manchester Orchestra and sold out Red Rocks. So still going strong, apparently.
Indra Raj: That’s so interesting. They were coming up in this era where the big labels owned everything and were really at their mercy of what they wanted. So good for them for doing what they want as well. And so glad that’s not so much of a thing anymore.
A Place for Owls: Yeah. I sometimes lament that there’s not more label support to up and coming artists. But honestly, The fact that you can run a broadly DIY project, get a little bit of notice, get a college radio hit, go on tour, and never have to touch someone who’s a slimy label person, is actually a gift, right?
Indra Raj: Such a gift. It just opens up the possibility for so many people. Just knowing yeah, I can do this by myself, or with the community around me. I don’t have to sell out to someone that I really don’t like.
A Place for Owls: Exactly. Yeah, very much.
Indra Raj: So you’ve been listening to the Afternoon Sound Alternative. We have A Place for Owls. Ben is here playing an acoustic set for us. They have a new album out called How We Dig in the Earth, and let’s hear one more song.
A Place for Owls: Let’s do it. This one’s from the new record and it’s called “A Tattoo of a Candle”.
Indra Raj: You’ve been listening to A Place for Owls live in the studio here at KGNU. Ben, thank you so much for being here today.
A Place for Owls: Yeah, thank you so much for having me.
Indra Raj: One last time for the listeners, how can they find out more about the band, the new music, new shows, all the rest?
A Place for Owls: It’s A Place for Owls, and it’s @aplaceforowls on almost every social media that you can think of. Instagram is the simplest place to find out when we’re playing next. We’ve abandoned Twitter largely for Bluesky, which seems to be the new Twitter. But folks can also go to aplaceforowls.com and sign up for our email newsletter which is the most reliable. Social media is crumbling in a lot of ways. The most reliable way for folks to keep in touch is just over the old school email list.
Indra Raj: Old school. I love email.
A Place for Owls: Yeah, me too.
Indra Raj: All right. Thank you so much, Ben. It’s really nice to have you.
A Place for Owls: Yeah, thank you so much for having me.
