Benjamin Doerr is a Seattle musician. He is the frontman for the band St. Paul de Vence, which just recently played Bumbershoot. Benjamin was asked a few years ago by his grandfather, a veteran of WWII, to put his stories into song. We asked him what this process was like. 

Jake Uitti: Your grandfather asked you to take his stories from WWII and turn them into music. What was the series of events, both in the day-to-day and in your mind, from the time of his request to you tracking the first few songs?

Benjamin Doerr: Well, it really started with my interest in my grandfather as a person, and our deepening relationship, as I’ve grown up.  We’re very close.  I could sense for a while that he was ready and wanting to share these stories from his life – especially the war – that he hadn’t really shared with any other family.

So, we sat down to chat and make audio recordings of our conversations.  The initial 3 hours of tape are pure gold.  They were the reference point I returned to time and again when working on the material that would become the debut St. Paul de Vence album.  My gramps was born in the South of France, in Nice, and he has this delightfully thick accent – even today, after 66 years living in the states.  So, the tapes are really musical themselves.  This was a big part of the process.  We started these recorded conversations at Thanksgiving in 2009 and by late 2010 I had a chunk of the work written, but had no idea it would become a record, or even a band, for that matter.  And originally he’d asked me if I would write his life into stories, maybe short stories (which I still plan to do) – and I’ve had some short starts with that project, but the songs seemed to flow really easily and I went with it.

There were three songs that were the first tunes I wrote based on stories he had shared.  Then I went to France with my grandfather and the whole thing kind of exploded, in a good way.  The visuals of the places of his childhood, and the occupation, just sent me deep in to creative mode.  I loved that period of time in my writing.   It was the most enjoyable songwriting I’ve done to date.  It just fell out, song after song, until I had an album’s worth.  It’s actually hard to recall the process, in a way.  Mostly, I’d start with a strain of fact from his story telling and let the poetry and music weave itself around and throughout the story line I’d chosen.  At the same time the band was starting to come together and take shape and I was able to just drop each new song into the mix, and everyone really ran with it.  We were having a great time.  It all felt very limitless.  Then we made a record.