Benjamin Stewart

Ben Stewart

Junkdrawers

Ben Stewart wanted his second solo album, Junkdrawers, to sound as raw and honest as the themes that inform it.

“I wasn’t aiming for perfection,” he nods. “There are noises and you can hear footsteps and weird stuff throughout it. I was just trying to capture personality the whole time. Things that weren’t making the cut were things that sounded like caricatures of other bands or artists. It was always, what would Ben Stewart do? I was looking for that.”

What he found was a collection of songs that trade the emo-pop of his ‘day job’ fronting Slowly Slowly for a sound that touches on slacker rock and shoegaze (“Goodbye My Valentine”, “Ruby Slippers”), vibrant British pop à la The Smiths (“Life In The Creases”), sweet acoustic indie pop (“You, Me & The Moon”) and angst-filled introspection (“Suicide”). It’s also a purposely rockier effort than his 2024 solo debut, Pushing Daylight.

“A lot of the teething process was in that first record, but now I know the voice,” he says. “It’s generally stuff that’s not very hook forward, but I still really resonate with. I’m just going with my gut for the whole thing. I don’t have to worry about pleasing anybody. It’s completely selfish.”

Though the origins of the songs traverse years and location, several were written in a hotel room in Los Angeles when Stewart was in town writing for Slowly Slowly’s Forgiving Spree album. “They were knee jerk reactions to the grind of the songwriting sessions,” he offers. “In those sessions you’re really looking for things that are going to be commercially viable and catchy. And so when I was getting back to my accommodation I was just like, I want to write something that’s kind of nothing.”

Not that Junkdrawers isn’t rich in memorable songs and earworm melodies – Stewart can’t help himself – but they were born from a pure creative space without care for radio play or chart positions. That freedom extended to Stewart’s willingness to explore the darkest parts of his psyche. “It’s not a superficial record,” he admits. “It’s really about stripping things back to what matters in your life. I think that’s where the gloominess comes in, and the darkness. Because I was really falling out of love with myself, for lack of a better term.”

A recurring theme is becoming a father to his daughter, Stella – who you can hear singing in “Goodbye My Valentine” and the closing title-track – and the life-changing revelations that came with it. “Goodbye My Valentine” charts a period when Stewart fell out of love with music for the first time ever as he adapted to his new role as a dad. “There was just not enough room in my heart for music anymore,” he says. “When she came along Slowly Slowly had multiple overseas tours, and it was really hard to reconcile the path that I’d been walking for 20 years.”

Stella’s presence also looms large in the sweet “You, Me & The Moon”, a song about Stewart missing his daughter while on the road and feeling comforted by the fact they see the same moon, no matter where he is. “It feels like there’s a little connection,” he says. “There’s A Room In My House”, meanwhile, charts the insecurities around the unknown leading up to her birth. One of the album’s darkest moments, the bleakly introspective “Suicide”, offers an astonishingly honest take on her impact on the singer. “I’ve always struggled with suicidal ideation,” he admits. “I’ve hinted at it in a million songs. For so many years I thought that’s how I’ll go. But I was forced to look at it in a different light since I had a kid. It didn’t become an option anymore.”

Casting his gaze a little further afield, Stewart wrote “Ruby Slippers” upon arriving in LA and being shocked at the epidemic of homelessness, particularly amongst people his age. After looking more deeply into the issue he realised so many of those sleeping rough shared a history of childhood trauma. The biting “Don’t Pray In My Church” was written in the wake of his beloved stepmother’s passing and his father’s religious conversion, yielding some of his most pointed lyrics: “You turn your cheek to tragedy/I want revenge/On God’s red right hand/They burned your sheets you were sleeping as soft a breath/Under a prayer we hide.” “The Glue Factory”, meanwhile, is an honest appraisal of the ups and downs of his marriage and those fork-in-the-road moments that cause each party to question their future together: “Are we going to the glue factory?”

Self-recorded and produced in his own studio, Stewart also plays all the instruments on Junkdrawers, save for some bass work by Richard Bradbeer and a few guitar parts from Mark Zito (Fractures). Georgia Smith, who contributed to Pushing Daylight, returns to lend her gorgeous vocal harmonies, while longtime Slowly Slowly live sound engineer Chris Peruch mixed the record. It’s the very definition of DIY.

After eight songs of desperate self-examination and, in some cases, brutal self-flagellation, the title-track brings the album to a close on a hopeful note. “My obsession as a kid was to go through junk drawers, like go through other people’s stuff – I loved going to op shops, I loved going to garage sales. I still love it,” says Stewart. “And Stella has inherited it. I think the metaphor I was using with hoarding all these emotional things is that it’s semi-unlocked when you have a kid and you end up passing down all these things inadvertently. The sentiment of the whole record is summed up in that metaphor.”

Given that Stella inspired much of the record thematically, it’s fitting that she plays a starring role in the song. “I wanted to finish with Stella singing – she’s made up her own song called ‘Happier’ and she sings it all the time,” smiles Stewart. “It felt so bleak there for a minute, and then it felt happier. That’s the arc of the record.”

ENDS