Features Mutual Benefit: ‘I Drove My Roommate Totally Crazy’

If there’s a formula to condensing as much magic and beauty as possible in less than 40 minutes’ worth of music, 25-year-old Jordan Lee might be the guy to ask. His advice? Just search for your inspiration in the water.

“I was looking into beautiful ponds for a while, the ones on the street and that, looking at the ripples in the water, and I really liked that feeling - it made my mind wonder,” says the Boston resident about the inspiration that led to Mutual Benefit’s new album ‘Love’s Crushing Diamond’.

As well as tough life experiences and more concrete events, the album comes from these simple, liquid beginnings: “What I was trying to capture was a peaceful feeling of when you look at the ripple of the water. It looks really chaotic, but it also makes sense - it’s somehow uniformed. Especially at the end of the song ‘C.L. Rosarian’, it feels like it’s going crazy for a while, like some energy in my head that I was trying to recreate with sounds.”

The thinking behind ‘Love’s Crushing Diamond’ all started with an epiphany from a magnetic poem, Jordan simply messing around with letters on a fridge. “If I ever go to someone’s house and I spot things like that, I need to play with them,” he says, stifling a giggle. “Sometimes they can be really silly, sometimes they come out and they have an actual meaning. That was just me putting together words, and that combination was really interesting to me - it got stuck in my head for weeks, and I realised that it was what I was writing my record about.”

Jordan self-released his first work in 2009, from the fragmented spooky pop psychedelia of ‘Figure in Black’ (apparently recorded into a broken karaoke machine) to the more mature folk-extravaganza of ‘I Saw the Sea’, where the sound of waves echoes the rich tapestry of ‘Love’s Crushing Diamond’. Ultimately, he’s always been surrounded by music since he was a teenager.

Started on the road in late 2011, the new album is a big shift forwards from his previous works. Lack of deadlines enabled him to keep tweaking it until he was completely satisfied. “The feeling I have is that it’s the first time that I am able to do something that I am 100% happy with.” Initially released on Bandcamp, this hidden gem received an outstanding reception, especially in Europe.

Despite self-releasing his first work in 2009, Jordan Lee has always been surrounded by music since he was a teenager. Playing in various self-started rock groups through the ages, he also worked in a church as a pianist. “It was a really traditional church where it was almost like a movie, and people felt the spiritual connection, and started screaming really wild [every time]. It was one of the most wild musical experiences I’ve ever had. When I moved to the East Coast and started playing big shows in different cities, I still had this idea that people would go to shows and see you playing to have, you know, some sort of spiritual experience.”

The album is a clash of sounds, layering in bells and drops from faraway traditions. “While I recorded this record I drove my roommate totally crazy,” Jordan says. “Almost everyday I was listening to Chinese music, and he had a rule that I could only listen to it while he was at work!” The mood of tracks like ‘Strong Swimmer’ resonates with ancient melodies, but the album also draws from a more modern influence, Jordan citing music from Shanghai “in the 30s and 40s”.

“You can tell there is a little bit of Western influence into it, almost like a jazz feeling, and I was listening to a lots of stuff like that, and I think some Asian skills translated into the record, just by accident.”

Another source of influence comes straight out from his pocket, as he confesses to having “a field recorder in my pocket all the time, to record some of the sounds.” He elaborates: “I was living in Boston for a while and I had a friend, who I really like hanging out with. We found this house, and I think it was a memorial and an old woman, and her husband passed away, and in memory of him, she hung up a hundred dreamcatchers - so one time we went there and recorded it for around 20 minutes.”

Jordan and his band will be in Europe at the beginning of next year to promote the release. “We’re on a small break until January and then we’ll be back for two three months in a row. I’ve never been to Europe before so I’m really excited. I want to do some dancing in Berlin, you know?” Pressed about what kind of dancing he prefers, Jordan surprises yet again: “Oh yeah, I wanna go hard and do some electro music.”