We were lucky to catch up with Ben Underwood recently and have shared our conversation below.

Ben, appreciate you joining us today. Do you feel you or your work has ever been misunderstood or mischaracterized? If so, tell us the story and how/why it happened and if there are any interesting learnings or insights you took from the experience?

My work is driven by misunderstandings. I started down the path of music and art largely because I didn’t feel I understood myself or my place in the world. And those internal self-misunderstandings set me on a trajectory of stumbling toward some sort of sense-making through recording, performing, and making collages. As I’ve begun to share my recorded and visual art with the world in a more intentional way over the last few years, I’ve encountered a lot of external misunderstandings too, and I’ve really embraced them. I mean, if I’m writing and recording songs and making collages largely out of a sense of fundamental confusion about why anything is the way it is—or that it is at all—I shouldn’t be surprised that the by-products of that confusion are themselves misunderstood by others.

Some of the misunderstandings happen because of the way I write and record songs. My songs are short and they have minimal lyrical repetition, i.e., pretty much no choruses. And I record myself at home using fairly rudimentary equipment. Those are all intentional choices. I want the songs to be brief, say what they have to say, and end. My main complaint about a lot of music I encounter isn’t that it’s bad, but that it’s boring. I’m working around that problem by not asking anyone to listen to me repeat a chorus three or four times. One time is generally enough. And I’m lo-fi on purpose. What excites me about a song is usually communicated in the earliest recording of it, and the more one goes back and tries to make it sound “better” or enhance it, the farther one gets from that original magical kernel that started the whole thing. So the songs are short and the production isn’t polished. A lot of people encounter that and think I need advice on song-writing and production, like, “oh, sweetie, don’t you realize songs are supposed to go like this?” and “people like it better when you make the drums sound like this…” And it’s not like I don’t think I need help or advice, but, for better or worse, I am doing it the way I’m doing it on purpose.

But I don’t mind being misunderstood, and in fact, I kind of enjoy it sometimes. Like I’ve found some nice open mics here in Asheville. They’re a great way to stay in fighting trim when it comes to performing. Most of the folks playing at these mics, many of whom are incredibly talented, are doing something that is maybe a little more recognizable as an acoustic-y folk-y and/or country kind of thing. I blaze in there and play three fast songs about death in two and a half minutes. People either appreciate that I’ve got my own thing going, and I’ve met some absolutely lovely people this way, or they just look at me like I don’t belong. Either way it’s kind of fun.

It also confuses people that I’m as much a visual artist as a musician, and I am surprised by how often it seems difficult for people to understand that I do multiple things.

Ben, love having you share your insights with us. Before we ask you more questions, maybe you can take a moment to introduce yourself to our readers who might have missed our earlier conversations?

I’ve made music and visual art since I was in high school, and it’s always been a sideline for me. I didn’t study those things in college, and I never really thought about them as options for making a living. Even today, I have a career in the nonprofit sector, and I love my work in that arena. It’s absolutely crucial to me that my creative work is not the source of my livelihood. If it were, and I had the existential/survival pressure of generating enough income to live from my art, I would grind to a halt and/or be compelled to produce material that doesn’t help me work through whatever it is I’m working through. I have a lot of respect for people who make a living through their creative work, but that’s not me.

So while music and art are not my primary source of income, my creative work is very, very important to me. I’ve come to understand that I need creativity to be a part of my life, and that—for whatever reason, right or wrong—I need to put what I’m doing out into the world in ways that feel real to me. Being a pure hobbyist and just playing songs in my basement and glueing up collages that only I see doesn’t have the same effect as when I put out an album, play a show, or display my collages.

I need the structure of artist-audience to work through whatever it is I’m working through via the sounds and images. It’s funny because I don’t need the audience to do anything. They don’t have to get it. They don’t have to like it. They don’t even have to pay that much attention. I mean, it’s great when anyone is compelled by anything I do, and I find that very nourishing, and I’m deeply grateful to the people who support and interact with my art, and I fundamentally need at least some of that, but that’s not the main thing for me. The main thing is the doing. My whole goal is just to keep doing it. So I’m looking for interesting ways to make music and collages and share them with the world and do so in ways that fit in with the rest of my professional and family life.

Since I’m liberated from the need to be a financially viable musician or artist, I’m free to find ways to engage in the artist-audience structure that are novel and interesting to me. For instance, when I put out my first album last summer, I wanted to press it on vinyl. That was a big part of it feeling real. But then you’ve got kind of a situation where you’ve fronted some money and you’ve got however many hundreds of copies of this record you’ve made. I have a lot of friends who are a lot more talented than me, and whose work is much more conventionally appealing, who have basements full of copies of their albums. There are worse things, but I wanted to avoid that. The conventional way to sell a record is to go on tour—not that the conventional methods work all that well. But since I’m a dedicated family man with a demanding career, any kind of substantial touring was pretty much off the table. But I had an idea.

I’m not a big mall guy, but I was at the local mall here in Asheville. Like a lot of malls these days there were a lot of empty storefronts, and that gave me an idea. Over the summer, when the album was released, I opened a record store in the Asheville Mall, a record store that sold only my album. It was a lot of fun. I had to jump through all these hoops to get the mall to rent a space to me, like setting up an LLC, getting liability insurance, etc., but for two weeks, I ran the Indoor Condor Pop-up Shop every day after work. It was a crazy experience. Talk about being misunderstood! People really could not understand what was happening. They would stumble into the store, and I would explain that the store sold only my album. They were either fascinated and hung around and talked and maybe bought a record, or they left immediately.

The other thing I did for the album release that was really fun was that I made a limited edition of the record. I hand-numbered them, and I made a unique collage to go with each copy. The cover of the album is a collage I made years ago of a lady with a lion’s head sitting on the beach. When I chose that for the cover, I had the idea of making a series of collages with the same theme—Animal-headed Pin-up Models—and I did it. I made 200, one for each copy of the limited edition. That’s more collages than I had made in my whole life up to that point. And the funny thing was that after I got my creative engine fired up, I kept going, and now, I’ve made many, many more, and the animal-headed figure thing has become a dominant trope in my collages. I’m sure that focus will shift at some point, but I’m fully embracing it for as long as it’s still interesting to me.

Are there any books, videos, essays or other resources that have significantly impacted your management and entrepreneurial thinking and philosophy?

This may be kind of an unusual way of answering this question, but I can point to a pretty finite list of books, poems, movies, TV shows, and art that are the things that inspire me: The Muppets, David Lynch, Winston Smith, Deadwood, Wallace Stevens, there are a few more. (I’m not going into music that inspires me as that list gets a lot longer.) But even among that fairly small list there is one book that has outsized influence on me. The one that compels me the most and that I’m sort of constantly rereading even through it not even 200 pages long is Ludwig Wittgenstein’s <i>Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus</i>. If you don’t know this book, in this slim volume, the Austrian-born analytic philosopher sets out solve all the problems of philosophy, and, it can be argued, he does. There are a lot of things I love about this book, but one of them is the sheer audacity. The gall to claim to have resolved the big questions faced by humanity in one cryptic book is cosmically hilarious and inspiring to me.

Spoiler alert: He solves the problems of philosophy by meticulously proving through tight logical reasoning that most of the seemingly intractable questions of philosophy are the result of misunderstandings. (That idea again!) In essence, the problems of philosophy are nonsense, and therefore are dispensed with.

Another aspect of the book that is fascinating to me is that it consists of a series of statements that are organized through a numbering system. The first statement of the book is numbered 1. The next is 1.1, and it’s a comment on 1. 1.2 is a further comment on 1. Then 1.11 is a comment on 1.1. So you have these statements that comment on one another and nest together in this very particular way. It’s sort of mind-bending, but it speaks to how intentionally organized the effort is in the book and how carefully composed it is.

I also love the aphoristic style of the text, where so many of the statements seem obvious to the point that even stating them feels absurd, yet they conceal so much depth. For instance, the first line of the book, in some translations, is “The world is everything that is the case.” I mean, it doesn’t get better than that. It’s literally everything, the whole world. And it’s unarguably true

So what does this have to do with my entrepreneurial thinking and philosophy? It shows me that you can do anything. Even something preposterous like solving all the problems of philosophy in a single short book. You can do it, provided that you do it.

Alright – so here’s a fun one. What do you think about NFTs?

NFTs are like any other medium. They contain the potential for interesting work, and they contain the potential for exploitation and vapidity. You’ll find more of the latter no matter the medium, and NFTs are no exception.

Contact Info:

• Website: indoorcondor.com
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/indoor.condor
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/ben.underwood.92351
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/underwoodben/
• Twitter: https://x.com/IndoorCondor
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCmJ9PqYuKCTQB5iUhyCAgRg?si=VonoFpoigSmHs1oo
• Other: https://open.spotify.com/artist/7rKIsn7r17mrho2V3IfwqN https://indoorcondor.bandcamp.com/

Image Credits
The personal photo is by Kyle Gordon.