Start Listening To: Billboard Style

After more than a decade making music together, Ben and Dan start again as Billboard Style with an album about love, friendship and the urge to blow everything up and begin anew.

Ben and Dan have been making music together for more than a decade, but Billboard Style marks a new beginning. Having previously worked together under the Ben Special name, the pair found themselves with a collection of songs that felt different enough to demand an identity of their own: more earnest, more collaborative and concerned with finding meaning in the everyday.

Their debut album Pull of the Moon turns that new approach towards love, uncertainty and the strange weight of decisions made when you were younger. Written partly while Ben questioned a relationship stretching back to his teenage years, it finds the pair abandoning some of their old songwriting habits in pursuit of something far simpler: songs that make you cry. We caught up with Billboard Style to talk starting again, learning to make records the hard way, emotional metal detectors and why sometimes you have to stop being precious about your music.

For those unfamiliar with your music, can you tell us who you are, where you’re from and about the music you make?

Hello, we are Billboard Style. Our names are Ben and Dan and this is our exciting new project.

You’ve been making music together for more than a decade, first under Ben Special and now as Billboard Style. What made you feel like this particular collection of songs needed a completely new identity?

We felt like these songs had a different attitude and were distinct enough to warrant a new project. Sometimes as an artist you feel stuck under a certain identity but to change would feel like surrendering something you’ve worked hard at for a long time. It’s important to remind yourself there are no rules. Ben Special started out as a solo project with more of a conventional artist/producer relationship but our process has evolved and our roles as collaborators have blended quite a bit since we started. 

Some of the songs on Pull of the Moon actually began life during the Ben Special years. What separated the songs that eventually became Billboard Style from the music you’d made together previously?

Dan’s been describing these songs as more humanist. The themes on this record are focused on love over time and creating meaning out of everyday life and they’re probably more melodramatic. The Ben Special tracks were a little wacky and had this circus element to them. I’m proud of that era but we’re trying to strip back the veil and be a bit more earnest.

Dan, you’ve described essentially choosing to spend years learning how to make records yourselves instead of paying somebody else to do it. How has that DIY process shaped the way Billboard Style sounds today?

I think spending years trying to do things yourself is cool because although it’s hard and you make a lot of bad stuff, in the end you find a way of doing things that’s completely your own and that’s something you can really be proud of. Also then you don’t have to spend money. - Dan Howard

Your roles seem to have become much more equal over the years, with Dan writing and singing more and Ben becoming less protective over the songs he brings into the studio. How did you build that level of trust as collaborators?

By making a million songs over many years. I just started realizing that whenever Dan changed or added something to the song it always made it better and I grew to trust his intuition even if I couldn’t see where he was going in the moment. It’s hard not to be precious about your music but ultimately you have to trust that the person you’re working with is making every decision for the good of the track.

Ben, much of the record was written while you were questioning a relationship that had lasted since you were a teenager. Did writing Pull of the Moon help you understand why love can keep such a powerful hold over us, even when it makes us unhappy

I don’t think so. It’s still a mystery to me but I guess that’s the fun. I don’t really write songs to find answers to questions, it’s just a cathartic exercise to expel angst. Staring off the balcony into the heavens with your hands clasped behind your back kind of thing. 

The title Pull of the Moon came partly from thinking about your Saturn return and this feeling that there was some mysterious presence hanging over you. How seriously were you thinking about astrology at the time, and what did the moon come to represent for you?

The phrase came at a moment of maximum tweaking for me. It’s a lyric from the song Cell, which I wrote the week before my girlfriend and I broke up for a brief period. It’s about continuing to live with a decision you made when you were a teenager and wondering how life might have been different now that so much time has passed. The pull of the moon is really the anxiety you feel about your life going a certain way and the desire to blow it all up and start anew. I would write lyrics looking up into the night sky on some emo shit and I thought about the moon’s control over the tides and felt like that image resonated with how my heart was being pulled in different directions.

‘Meloxicam’ starts with almost mundane questions like someone’s favourite snack before gradually becoming much more existential. Where did the idea of using that series of questions to explore a relationship come from?

I needed a prompt so I found a listicle suggesting questions to ask someone on a first date. That grew into the more existential line of questioning.

You’ve said that with Ben Special the songwriting could become too cerebral, whereas now the goal is simply to “write songs that make you cry”. What changed your relationship with songwriting and made you want to return to something more immediate?

I think something clicked for me when I was writing I Am a Man. That was in the thick of my long distance relationship so it was a lonely time. I remember writing the first verse of the lyrics through tears and I used them like an emotional metal detector. I wrote down anything that made me cry more. It simplified things for me and brought me back to that type of angst you feel as a teenager that draws you to music in the first place. There’s something elemental about it that would bring the songs to a more honest place.

You’ve described Pull of the Moon as an emotional snapshot of your friendship and how you’ve grown together. When you listen back, where can you most clearly hear the difference between the two people who met at that Maryland house show and who you are now?

It’s cool to think about how long ago that was and how our ambitions have remained basically the same since then. We’ve just worked really hard and made hella songs and a lot of mistakes and now we’ve figured out how to make records.

What do you love right now?

Pancakes.

What do you hate right now?

Small plates restaurants.

Name an album you’re still listening to from when you were younger and why it’s still important to you?

Turning On by Cloud Nothings. I was obsessed with this album in high school and have gotten back into it in the last few years. It’s a perfect blend of raw and sweet and melodic and youthful. I love when a record sounds like shit but the songwriting is undeniable. It’s a great example of an album that works equally well for shaking your ass as it does for looking out the window on the school bus.

When someone hears your music for the first time, what do you hope sticks with them?

I just hope it moves the needle for people one way or another, whether they love it or hate it. I think it’s important for music to evoke some kind of a reaction.