Written by Steve Wildsmith
A special piece from Maryville Daily Times
Ben Gaines’ childhood was less than ideal, but music was always a bright spot.
The Knoxville-based singer-songwriter, who plays around town with his band Three Star Revival, remembers well shuttling back and forth after his parents divorced, his dad behind the wheel as the car headed toward small West Tennessee towns like Paris and McKenzie.
“He loved music, and the first thing he did was put in ‘Abbey Road’ and say, ‘We’re going to listen to this whole thing and pick it apart,’” Gaines told The Daily Times this week. “He would stop it and make me repeat one line over and over — ‘The love you take is equal to the love you make’ — and then on the way back, he would put on ‘Pet Sounds.’ We listened to them over and over, and I learned everything about them. I wasn’t sure music was what I wanted to do back then, but I fell in love with it at an early age.”
In creating “Years Gone By,” the new Three Star Revival album, with his fellow musicians, Gaines kept going back to those two seminal records of his childhood. Listeners won’t find a lot of gauzy psychedelic beach or Brit-pop on “Years Gone By,” but they will find it hard to put down. There’s a certain dreaminess woven throughout the 10 tracks, and when Gaines and his bandmates lock in on one another, the songs reach an anthemic crescendo with the urgency of a man driving hellbent for leather to get to his lover’s side before she boards the plane that will carry her across the country.
“I think the biggest thing about those records, and what we tried to do with this one, was that they were an art piece as a whole,” Gaines said. “You could listen to songs individually, or start from the beginning and listen to it as an orchestral piece, and they made you feel every range of emotion: sadness, some fear of the unknown, hopefulness, love. I love that they were able to convey an entire motif of ideas over the course of an album.”
Although he’s a more than capable guitar player (and, sources say, a mind-bogglingly talented freestyle rapper as well), he started out singing. Until he hit puberty, his voice wasn’t anything to be proud of, he said; his dad often told him to “get good or quit,” but he kept singing until around the age of 13, a teacher heard him singing as he walked down the school corridors and asked him to join the choir.
“I was a Tenor One, and I fell in love with music even more,” he said. “I picked up on it like it was an extension of myself. I didn’t realize how much my dad showing me all that music helped me.”
By 14, he was writing down poetry and lyrics; he started his first band at 16 — they played at a Starbucks in Jackson, Tenn. — and when he was 20, he finally picked up the guitar. The University of Tennessee’s engineering program brought him to Knoxville (that and UT football, he added), and his first East Tennessee-centric project was a band called Blue Heavy. He eventually started the Ben Gaines Band, but when both parents died within a narrow time frame, he stepped away from music for a couple of years, he said.
“It was really hard for me to get up in front of people, because doing that is such an emotional thing,” he said.
Around that time, however, he met bandmate Cameron Moore, and together, they started the journey that would eventually lead to Three Star Revival. And in crafting songs for it, Gaines found a measure of peace — with his past, with the death of his parents and with the path upon which he’s found himself.
“I’m finally turning into a musician, I guess; this is the first thing I’ve released where I feel like I’m headed in the right direction on something,” he said. “My dad never got to hear it, and he was always critical because for years I was much better at engineering than I was at music, but he’s the reason I strive to be great. I want to make the best songs I can, ever, but I wouldn’t play music without his influence.”
