Benjamin Folke Thomas

Sunday

Ben is a young artist whose time has come. His third album, Rogue State Of Mind, released by Bucketfull Of Brains, represents the summation of the talents of this remarkable young Swede. Ben was born in February 1988, during the coldest winter recorded in Sweden in the 80s, and grew up on a small island west of Gothenburg in the Kattegat Sea. The seeds of many of his more autobiographical songs were sown during this formative period.

Ben started out playing drums at the age of 12 in a skatepunk band that rapidly developed into grunge, due to an obsession with Kurt Cobain and Nirvana. But then Ben started listening to folk music and from there he progressed to Bob Dylan and Townes van Zandt. “Sad guys with guitars have always been my involuntary preference”, says Ben, but you could hardly describe him as sad.

His acoustic guitar skills astonishing, while his songs reveal depths of emotion and stories from a young life that has been lived hard. This is a man who has loved and lost and channels his feelings into his work. His uniquely engaging stage presence displays the kind of humour sadly missing in the work of so many introspective singer-songwriters.