Ben Labat has been on the verge of stardom. He had a major-label deal with Capitol Records, and his music has been featured in zeitgeist television shows from The Real World to Jersey Shore. But after a career that spans nearly three decades, the Louisiana native has found himself most comfortable when he’s processing his own life through writing and singing folk-rock tunes.
Labat says that the more music — aided by artificial intelligence and technology — has moved away from simple approaches to lyrics and melodies, the more he’s been drawn back to them.
“I like the reverse of AI and the use of technology, and all the wild and crazy things you can do with it in film and writing and graphic design and music” Labat tells Rolling Stone. “It felt good to just be me and an acoustic guitar.”
But Labat did find at least some inspiration in science for his new album Echolocationism. A one-time physics teacher, he’s fascinated by the sonar-like senses that marine animals like dolphins use to navigate the open ocean — called “echolocation” (hence the title of his album). Echolocationism is his seventh studio LP since 2006, and he wrote 10 of the 11 tracks himself. Only a cover of Harry Styles’ hit “Matilda,” which Labat says is his daughter’s favorite song, keeps the album from being entirely original material.
He recorded Echolocationism himself, playing a Martin D-28 acoustic guitar that his grandfather once owned. The guitar had been sold for a time, but Labat bought it back and was compelled to build an album around it. “I started digging through the songs that never made it to a full-band cut, and then they just kind of all came together,” he says.
The album opens with “Set a New Course,” which Labat delivers in a gravelly Louisiana drawl over that very acoustic guitar. You can hear echoes of Springsteen’s best stripped-down material in the melody, especially when Labat laments, “Life tuned me up and played me like a song/so I set a new course.”
“It’s really about finding that new path,” Labat says. “Whether it’s a job or a relationship, moving to a new city, having children. I’m trying to be a parent and explain that things are not always gonna go your way. You’re gonna have to embrace the change, and sometimes, things are gonna happen and you won’t be the same. The way you look at things and how you react will be different.”
The pared-back approach he took with Echolocationism took root 20 years ago in Labat’s full-band debut LP. At the time, he fronted the Louisiana alt-rock outfit the Terms. Their first record was Small Town Computer Crash, released in 2006 and produced by the late Grammy winner Greg Ladanyi (Jackson Browne, Warren Zevon). Labat was intrigued by Ladanyi’s attention to detail in the studio and he took the best notes he could and applied them to Echolocationism.
“It set a very high bar for my current recording process,” he says. “Finalizing arrangements, rehearsing until you were tired of it, listening back to the recordings, feeling the emotion in the vocal — all those little things and that technical attention to detail still carry through to the quality of music I try to produce today.
“I remember listening to masters with Greg on as many different formats as possible — car stereo, high quality headphones, low quality headphones, studio speakers, TVs,” he continues. “I still do that today. And while I didn’t bounce ideas off of another human being, I would often ask myself, ‘Would Greg approve?’”
Small Town Computer Crash charted as Billboard Heatseeker and landed the Terms some television appearances, but shortly after it dropped, an auto accident forced a premature end to the band. After a brief stint in New York pursuing a new record deal, Labat returned to Louisiana, started a family, and launched Ben Labat & the Happy Devil — a largely regional band that released four full-length records starting in 2010. The Happy Devil is still around, but Labat tours solo these days, in and around a day job and coaching youth soccer. He enjoys the intimate feel of his shows and says it reflects his approach to art and songwriting in general.
Like the dolphins that partly inspired Echolocationism, he’s trusting his senses to navigate where his music goes next.
“I tried to write commercially for a little bit, and I can do it, but it was not easy for me,” he says. “I wanted to write songs when I felt like writing about whatever material I wanted to write about. That was my creative outlet.”
Josh Crutchmer is a journalist and author whose upcoming book, Sonoran Sounds, is set for release in March 2027 via Back Lounge Publishing.
