We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Ben Traverse a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.

Hi Ben, thanks for joining us today. When did you first know you wanted to pursue a creative/artistic path professionally?

I knew I wanted to pursue a career in traditional music after attending an after-school music camp called The Quest in high school put on by SEEDs, Blackbird Arts, and Earthwork Music celebrating Alan Lomax coming to Michigan and Wisconsin in 1938 to collect music from working people. I’ve played guitar since I was a kid, but I was much more interested in history, especially history through a cultural lens. I knew that music traditional to cultures existed, but it felt like something that only existed in the past. The Quest showed me that wasn’t the case. It existed in the past, but also exists in the present, and is very much alive and evolving. After that, I was hooked. I spent a lot of time in high school just browsing the digitized Lomax archive, absorbing all of these different forms of cultural music, and I couldn’t get enough.

Ben, before we move on to more of these sorts of questions, can you take some time to bring our readers up to speed on you and what you do?

I started in the music industry mostly by doing very small behind the scenes stuff. I moved to Grand Rapids to study audio engineering at the community college where I did a *lot* of street teaming for local bands. From there, I moved onto selling merch for those bands, and eventually started working in a more intern capacity for Mark Lavengood/Bear Mark Productions, Seth Bernard, and toured with The Accidentals working with their sound engineer. All of those experiences together gave me the background I needed to fully launch into working full time in music.

As for what I do, I primarily play traditional music. But it’s very rare for a full time musician to do just one thing. I, until very recently, was a one-person operation, and did all of my booking, promotion, recording, management, promotion, and some graphic design by myself. Recently, I’ve brought an intern into the fold, and she has been doing an incredible job helping take promotion and social media management off of my plate. Shoutout to Autumn.

There are a lot of things around my job that I’m proud of. I’m proud to be a member of the Earthwork Music Collective. I’m proud to be someone working to preserve traditional music and to bring new people into the fold. This especially comes through in my collaborative recordings like my sea shanty project with Michael Dause (Moss Manor, Treeskin) and my upcoming release of Irish music with Nick Veine. I’m also proud to use traditional music as a vehicle for education, community engagement, and activism.

Learning and unlearning are both critical parts of growth – can you share a story of a time when you had to unlearn a lesson?

The biggest lesson I’ve had to unlearn is probably the toxic masculinity that was ingrained into me as a kid from growing up in a small town. There were lots of forces around me pushing gender roles that weren’t healthy for anybody. It’s always an ongoing process, but my friends and community have done so much to provide a space where I could see what unlearning things like toxic masculinity could look like. They helped me become a more authentic version of myself.

For you, what’s the most rewarding aspect of being a creative?

The most rewarding aspects for me are collaboration and community. Creative fields allow for such a unique way for people to work together in a way that leads to authentic vulnerability, like writing a song together, and it is through this field that I’ve been able to form some of the most meaningful relationships in my life.

Contact Info:

• Website: bentraversemusic.com
• Instagram: instagram.com/bentraversemusic
• Facebook: facebook.com/bentraversemusic
• Other: https://bentraverse.bandcamp.com https://open.spotify.com/artist/1Fx7I4IB4bAYkseIUmcqvP https://music.apple.com/us/artist/ben-traverse/1574757229

Image Credits
Victoria Stark @vstarkphotos Liz Tiffany Jonathan Alfano @wildsubterranean_