Benjamin Brackett

Brought into this world with an insatiable hunger for cheap booze and a taste for all things sweet, Benjamin Brackett spent his (very) formative years in the dense wilderness of the Santa Cruz mountains, where he learned how to fight bears and dissect Jim Croce albums. Then he turned four, participated in a shamanic ritual of epic proportions, and discovered psychedelics, at which point everything seemed a little different.

It was only a few years later that he tumbled downhill into the great Silicon Valley, and watched with regret as computers and capitalists worked together to do away with every ranch and orchard left untouched by city boys and real estate developers. Little did he know, he would soon become a city boy himself, but not before he lost all his teeth, traded a treasure map for an acoustic guitar, and began writing rambling confessionals set to three chord country song structures, cheap imitations of Woody Guthrie and early Hank Williams. These pieces of work Brackett kept to himself, sending master tapes to a Filipino record producer for release in the Phillipines only when he REALLY needed the cash. He would later set out on a journey across the country, playing snare in a Civil War re-enactment corps, falling in love in New Orleans and out of love in Nashville, wandering, looking for something and nothing all at the same time, and nearly losing his fingers on a casino boat after a sour game of blackjack. He'd also find money where he needed it through song, writing jingles for corn-flour and pomade advertisements, to be played on the public radio.

He eventually found his way back to California by way of the Pacific Northwest. Smelling of vodka and freshly chopped wood, and surrounded by a newly formed group of comrades, he managed to finagle his way into ownership of some impressive recording equipment, and set about putting his musical experiments to tape.

These days, he can be found rattling around at Studio Garujio, the cozy recording studio he's filled with musical instruments and various other providers of noise. When he's not recording, he's sleeping, watching films, reading books, or writing exceedingly self-indulgent and hyper-pretentious personal biographies in his freezing cold bedroom in the dead of night.