Benjamin Tod walked away from the Lost Dog Street Band in late 2022. He barely caught his breath before he wrote the perfect Lost Dog record.
Shooting Star, released last month, marked a sharp turn into old-school honky-tonk music for Tod. The 33-year-old got his start busking in Nashville with folky tunes based on personal, often dark, lyrics, but Shooting Star’s 10 tracks are undeniably country, with sounds that echo several decades of the Nashville Sound. He wrote all but one song on the album over two weeks in early 2023 and envisioned it as a solo project — in the spirit of last February’s Survived — but quickly realized the tunes would be a better fit for his dormant band.
“When we listened, we were just like, ‘These aren’t honky-tonk enough. They don’t fit the style. They’re more Americana. They’re more Lost Dog,’” Tod tells Rolling Stone. “So I started piecing that together, and then a couple more songs came, and I just felt like it was time to go back into the studio. We went back in April, with Lost Dog, and cut that record.”
Tod and his wife, fiddle player Ashley Mae, formed Lost Dog Street Ban d in 2011. In just over a decade, the group was reliably selling out 1,000-capacity rooms around the United States playing songs that drew upon Tod’s hard-living, nomadic past as a train-hopper (“I’m an experienced tramp,” he once told RS). He never shies away from old drug habits or his days of getting kicked out of Robert’s Western World as a teenager in Nashville.
Today, he and Mae live on 400 acres in Muhlenberg County, Kentucky, and most of Tod’s day is filled with work. “Music is like 10 percent of my life,” he says. “Like, I’m tearing down an engine. I am proposing things to the board of the nonprofit that I’m on. My sister calls and says she needs a trailer moved, so I move heaven and earth and do what needs to be done. Or it’s hunting season and I disappear for two weeks.”
Music, thus, becomes something of a hobby for Tod. A lyric or melody will pop into his head while he’s working, and if he’s lucky, he’ll remember it that evening. When he had the idea for Shooting Star, he decided to keep it in that context.
“Some people spend their entire lives dedicated to this type of music, and I want to write it in two weeks,” he says. “I want to prove that I can do this anyway, anyhow, and I can eat your fucking lunch. That was the attitude I went into writing with. I wanted to make something stupendous and put very little effort into it, as opposed to everyone else who is clawing at straws and fighting for attention.”
He started toying with the opening track, “I Ain’t the Man,” during the final Lost Dog tour in 2022 — even playing it at soundcheck occasionally. The song is a repudiation of the cowboy culture that Tod saw taking over Nashville. The lyrics (“These city slicks don’t understand, Lord I ain’t the man you think I am”) offer a warning that Tod’s not one for cosplay.
“That song was kind of written from the perspective of myself coming into town and being mistook for a hipster, and me having to put people in their place,” Tod says. “This shit happens all the time. They had me at the Basement [in Nashville] recently, and I had it out with the door guy until it came to a head. I had to say, ‘Hey, dumbass. You see that empty spot on the building, where they paint the murals? My face is gonna be there tomorrow.’ It was one of those — this is my fucking town, and some kid who just moved there three months ago is smarting off to me, and I put him in his place.”
The other nine tracks follow in the same spirit, but showcase a range in the music that allows Tod to call back to sounds from the 1950s as smoothly as he and the band call back to 90s country. It’s heavy on fiddle and steel guitar, and there are some high-profile guest appearances. Nashville favorite Timbo contributes backing vocals to “I Ain’t the Man.” The closing track, “One Last Time,” is a duet with Tod’s longtime friend Sierra Ferrell, with the two singing in harmony from the start. It’s easy to hear it and imagine a sawdust-covered dance floor from half a century ago as the backdrop, but it also emphasizes an understanding that Ferrell and Tod have for each other that’s rooted in a time when neither was anything close to a success. Both got their starts as itinerant musicians.
“There are things, about the experiences of where we came from and where we are now, that not many people can understand,” Tod says of Ferrell. “I’m proud of her to no end. But there are very particular things about what that life does to someone’s psychology that only me and her can relate to.”
In December, Tod and Lost Dog will wrap up a three-plus month tour in support of Shooting Star in Nashville at Brooklyn Bowl. It’s a fitting tour end for Tod, who views the album as his reminder to the city where he got his start that depth is imperative to music.
“Now, Nashville is probably the coolest town in America,” he says. “It’s the hippest spot. Fuck New York. Fuck L.A. Fuck Atlanta. Fuck Detroit. Fuck Denver. Fuck everywhere. It’s Nashville where everything is happening. So maybe that’s kind of my personal take on being someone that’s from Music City, and watching this all come together, and realizing, I deserve a piece of this pie, and I’m going to fucking take it.”
Josh Crutchmer is a journalist and author whose third book, Red Dirt Unplugged, is set for release on December 13, 2024, via Back Lounge Publishing, and available for pre-order.
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