A Short Autobiographical Sketch
Ben Ranson was born in the cab of 72' GMC pickup truck on the side of the road next to Big Pine Lake, Minnesota. He grew up on a farm between Bluegrass and Nimrod, where he picked berries, defleshed skulls for the family collection and read a lot of books. Around the age of twelve or thirteen, he learned to play a few chords on the guitar from his older brother.
Guitar became the focus of his life. He practiced by playing along to his father's collection of old blues and rock and roll records. His parents prohibited television watching and spent a lot of time making Ben and his brothers do math homework. As a result, Ben was ignorant of many trends in popular music but well prepared to be a composer.
In high school, he strummed a "Lotus" brand electric guitar in a punk rock cover band called the Judo Chops. This band was pretty hardcore for rural Minnesota. They practiced in an enormous, uninsulated, machine shed full of tractors. In the winter they huddled around the shed's barrel stove while rocking out to songs by the Ramones and the Dead Kennedys.
Dave Kerkvliet, the local high-school music teacher, purchased a four-track recorder and turned an unused band-room closet into a studio. With no direction other than the requirement to turn in some sort of recorded music on tape at the end of the semester, Ben combined rap with long guitar solos and old-time country with synthesized drums in his first compositions. Soon, Ben purchased a four-track tape recorder of his own, which he used until the mechanical parts wore out.
As a college student, Ben learned how to home-brew beer, experimented with indoor horticulture, practiced his guitar and took a lot of road trips. He avoided going to class at four colleges and universities and, through no effort of his own, obtained mail-order credits from another two. It took him a while to decide to be a composer.
Eventually, he settled at Boston's Berklee College of Music where he made it his goal to master music theory and songwriting. His counterpoint classes with Yakov Gubanov exerted an enormous influence on his writing, as did his arranging classes with Grammy award winner Richard Evans.
Although Ben had produced many demo recording and sketches, he had not completed anything that he felt was suitable for publication at the time of his graduation in the spring of 2005. Desperate to produce something, he started on an album while working part time selling home-brewing supplies to make ends meet.
Composing and recording Eighteen Wheels of Pain took Ben two and a half years of trial and error. His perfectionism and incompletely developed production skills cost him time as he rewrote and rerecorded part after part. At his recording sessions, his Berklee friends honked, banged and scraped through his poorly notated, wrinkled and smudged charts, until, in the summer of 2007, Ben ran out of money and was forced to move back to Minnesota.
Undaunted by the need to make a living, Ben played in wedding bands, worked the till in a thrift shop, and taught lessons until he had enough money to buy home studio equipment so he could record the last tracks. After another year and a half of mixing and remixing, Ben completed the album and distributed the first copy on April 7th, 2009.
He is now writing material for another album.
