Content Keywords: Disability, Grief, Harm Reduction, Psychiatry, Trauma
Through experiments with technology, improvisation and new-found acceptance of lived experience, Ben E. Wood has built something of a catharsis-fueled time machine. The output is a rich and layered concept album that plays with hurt, love, anguish, wisdom, and self-destruction-for-the-sake-of-self-rebuilding. This album (and its live show counterpart) curiously dance through each stage of grief, ultimately landing on acceptance as the last stop. This is not just a story of endurance, it’s about transformation and growth. It’s about coming to accept reality, with all its pain and beauty. It’s about coming to terms with disability, and all that we can’t change.
This album is a dreamlike companion to crisis and recovery, drawing aesthetic inspiration from folk-punk, clowny 90s rock and psychedelic anti-folk. The refrains and motifs that weave in and out of the project are meant to tie each string into the bigger knot that is recovery. While the project is full of hard-found wisdom, throughout the show we get to see the emotional backstage of what it feels like to seek help.
Farewell Strange Hotel is about the derailment that comes from crisis, and the effort of helping the train onto a new track. This album moves us through frantic manic fear and urgency, to grounded and thoughtful resolutions. There’s pain and levity and roadblocks and epiphanies. And restarts. Sometimes recovery walks a circular path, and the lyrical and melodic interplay between the songs reflects that. It’ll walk with you. Sometimes in circles.
