Benjamin Waumett
1982 – 2024
By Victor Waumett
Our beautiful son, Benjamin Wuamett, passed on Oct. 26, 2024 just at the start of night. He would have been forty-three years old in December.
There’s a Memorial singalong January 24 at Mississippi Studios, Portland, Ore.
Ben, with the help of his band, Ezra Bell, was the most listened to Subud musician since The Byrds. Listeners on Spotify approach seventy million, plus Apple and other music platforms.
He left us far too soon (from my point of view). But looking back, it wasn’t surprising.
He always wrote about death—and drinking. From one of his first songs:
Let us take the kids to the graveyard
Let them see what’s pushing the stems
Try to be as quiet as they are
Try to think of death as your friend
And…
I go down to the bar to give away my cigarettes,
I go down to the bar to sit and wait for death
But I can’t wait forever with the breezes and the bums
Soldiers came to shoot us down, but Jesus jammed the guns
Pretty literate for a guy who didn’t have a high school diploma. He didn’t start reading books until he was in jail for six months, with nothing else to do.
He didn’t start out trying to be a songwriter. He wanted to be a gangster, but that didn’t work out. Ruslan and Ben’s brother Andrew helped him escape to Europe for a couple of years.
When he came back, he was focused on music. He taught himself to play the guitar, taught himself to sing, taught himself to write songs, forced himself to perform until he was good at it . . . great at it, actually.
Ben moved to Portland, built bands, first Palace Fiction, and then Ezra Bell. They played Portland clubs, the Doug Fir, and Mississippi Studios. They toured the country, played LA, Denver, Memphis, Asheville, New York, Chicago, Seattle…
Ezra Bell launched a nationwide tour at the end of February 2020. Five days into the tour, it was cancelled by Covid, as well as everything else. His disappointment got covered by drinking. Ben sang about drinking a lot.
You just fell asleep right on the floor,
Asleep with all your clothes right on the floor
That’s not how I want my life to be,
Never ever seemed like much of a life to me.
And still, about death:
We cold-called our mothers,
While we waited for the train
All save Cleveland, he sat silent
No cell service from the grave
Ben passed in Salt Lake City, in the midst of negotiations for the band’s best record deal ever. They were to tour the West in late October, then DC, New York and Boston in November.
He loved the Latihan. He said it gave him some of the only peace he ever knew. When I was flying to him, knowing he was dying, I asked (prayed) for Lilijana to come and help him cross over, and she came, but was quickly overshadowed by Bapak, totally in charge, his presence saying to me, “I got this.”
Ben’s story did not end there. The record contract has been signed. There’s enough unreleased music for two more albums. There’s talk of a documentary about his life. Fans still play his songs as the “first dance” at weddings.
We debated about who was the best writer-him or me. You decide. This was one of my favorite verses of his:
Come and push me on the rope swing, darling,
Like back when we were friends.
There was nothing underneath me
And I had the whole sky overhead.
And here’s the last thing I have that he wrote:
Off into the great unknown
They shan’t cast my mistakes in stone
Every place here is home
And every single seat a throne
I’ll tell the truth in case you don’t
I will tell the truth.
Farewell, Ben. May flights of angels wing thee to thy rest.
Lovely, Victor. You do great honor to Ben Thank you, and condolences to you and Liliana.
Your brother,
Reynold Ruslan in Boulder, CO
My deepest condolences Victor. Thank you for telling us about Ezra Bell. I am eager to experience their energy.
Victor brother,
What an amazing and touching tribute to your beautiful son Ben. I’m more than feel your tender love for him and can’t imagine that you lost both Ben and Liliana in this short period of time. My thoughts, love and prayers are with you now and always.
Oh, Victor, I have tears in my eyes. What a beautiful tribute honoring Ben and the complexity of who he was. In my mind, he’s still the adorable boy I cared for in Santa Cruz. Much love to you and the rest of the family as you mourn for your sweet Ben.
I think about Ben often. We had a quiet, but real relationship. Indescribable really, but we loved each other. He once honored me, by insisting that I participate in a little pick-up band at a gathering in Colorado. That appreciation touched me deeply. I never really got into his music, but I enjoyed watching him perform, and it always fascinated me how deeply he touched others. I worried about him a little bit, not knowing anything about why. Scared me a bit too, that not knowing.
I hope you’re ok now. Love you.
To me, and I believe Ben would agree, words are the most beautiful and meaningful symbols the gods have seen fit to gift us. And as someone who trades in words to please his own slowing neuronal pulses, and loves them beyond measure, and shared them with Ben at any and every opportunity – I say without reservation that in this moment words fail me. They are inadequate. Benjamin, I loved you since we shared the swirling madness of youth. I love you still. And I cannot but inveigh the velevetined cosmos whilst remembering the time I was fortunate enough to spend with you. I drove 170 miles an hour in a Bimmer with Benjamin, at his behest. After the best whiskey and the finest cigarettes. On a cold dry cloudless night in Idaho. Half drunk and alive as fuck. I will miss exchanging words with you like our counterparts exchanged swords. I will miss the art and the music that flowed from you like a fountain. I will miss drunken early AM calls. I will miss the shared history, always. I will miss the Ben that didn’t just try to be a gangster but for a time was – the Ben that sat in my living room 30 years or 10 thousand nights ago with duffel bags of the finest green at his feet, flanked by large Asian-Candian ruffians exhorting me to increase my idle Summers to perpetual twilights of roaring commerce. The Ben who whispered to me in South Bellevue kitchens of dust and of women. Becka on a couch nearby. And look what you became, Ben. The man and the mess and the artist. You have left us so much beauty. Singular verse, again and again and again. You haven’t answered my poetry, dark eyed and drunk and waiting for months and months in inboxes that lay fallow now. You fucking bastard. Where did the soup meet the spoon? Where did eternity kiss the vanishing moon? WHERE DID YOU GO AND WHY WON’T YOU FUCKING RETURN?
I will miss Ben terribly and cherish the memories of recording music with him in the Duvall barn. Ben was, is, a dear friend and inspiration.
I don’t know who will read or even if this will be read, I hope it will though. Learned about his unfortunate passing today after googling some lyrics, because the song titles are in my opinion pretty elusive (but often poetic).
I’ve had bouts will depression all my life but 2020 was hard. Things had started to look up in 2019, some real personal accomplishments had been made. Plans were made, most notably a trip to Arizona with my mom to visit Sedona and a lot of national parks in northern Arizona/south Utah. I’m from Sweden, so it was to be a major adventure.
Obviously, covid killed it. The disappointment from the trip, and the gloom from the pandemic. The constant, never ending news about how the world is fucked, uncountable amounts of people were dying. And all I could do was to read the news, watch the press briefings. The uncertainty and doubt, the change in how things are done. Well, they were tough. And they stayed tough until about 2022, when the world and (maybe correspondingly) my well-being became brighter.
It was in October 2022 that I made my first Ezra Bell playlist. I had listened sporadically to Goat’s Milk but i got “recommended” by the algorithm Junk Food Chimney, and it was so great I wanted more stuff like it. So I made a playlist with only it, and then told spotify to make a radio based on it. It filled up with artists like Together Pangea, Neutral Milk Hotel, The Districts and Shakey Graves. But maybe most importantly the song The 5-Year Binge.
I’ve always had a curse of a fascination with drugs, mainly alcohol. And the anxiety it has caused made that song really speak to me. And with that I started listening to more Ezra Bell. Obviously not all songs are dour as alcohol abuse, but the lyrics still spoke to me, some more than others.
In May 2024 I traveled with my mom from a small town in Sweden to Phoenix. Although we had an extremely stressful layover in London where I lost my belt and sweater, we made it without any real problems. We visited Sedona, Petrified Forest, Monument Valley, Grand Canyon, Kaneb, Bryce Canyon and Zion (my favorite). All the while Ezra Bell was playing in the car stereo.
Benjamin Waumett’s vocals and songs were the backdrop to one of the few cherished moments I’ve had in the past years. And I thank him and the rest of Ezra Bell for it whenever I listen to their music.
Thank you Victor for this beautiful eulogy.
Thank you Benjamin and the rest of Ezra Bell for the wonderful music.
i know you’re gone and my words come too late.
i saw the concert announcement this year and my heart clenched with glee. i could finally meet you. listen to you sing. listen live to those words that helped scrub the darkness from my mind. sing along with the crowd. and weep into my sleeve.
maybe i’d get the courage to approach you.
maybe i wouldn’t feel the fool spilling my heart to a stranger whom i knew better than he knew me.
but time passed and along with it my chance. and like that concert from the announcement, this note is a eulogy.
how i wanted to tell you that your lyrics spoke to me; soft but stern, like a guardian angel on my shoulder. that they pulled me back from that darkness that had swallowed me so fully for so many years and threatened me so many times that my end was my only true friend.
from your words, i saw myself from the outside. i saw who i am versus who i used to be, who i desperately longed to be and i hated it. i hated it so very much. and i hated it so much that i despised me.
but you spoke to me without knowing my name. without knowing my darkness, my struggle.
and because of you, i dragged myself out of that corner. because of you i saw i was good, strong, and handsome. i saw who i needed to be.
i saw that i sowed that same gloom that was eating my happiness.
and i saw that i controlled my everything.
and because of you, i’m doing so much better now.
the next time i visit an orchard ill whisper your name and maybe, just maybe, you’ll hear me.
and maybe you’ll answer.
i love you too. don’t make me say it again.
Ben is and may always be my favourite lyricist of all time
A wonder you are not here. I go to the places we went, i went, hoping to run into you when i was too young for you but longed for you like an absent limb, a desire which drove me deliciously crazy and which i was often guilty of nursing, even as i scorned its object. Did i objectify you? Could you see that before i did? You were kind because i understand you, you, who made a living from reading the rest of us.
The thing which made me fall in love with you was not your voice lifted up in song but lowered in talk. I cannot forget us in the cool pink dawn of late summer, the floor of your rented kitchen, the ceiling a blue shimmer i fell into… sometimes I check my email and a part of me still hopes for something from you there; a part still larger understands the way one takes for granted gravity that there will be nothing new from you, will never be again, that you are gone from me permanently, deader than swatted flies. Yet i keep (in yearning) something of you alive in me. Ben, if as a guest you are uncomfortable in these conditions then i am a merciless warden. I want you still. All these years. Like a child refusing goodbye