The Only Living Boy In Brooklyn

Reflection on releasing my first album

My debut album The Only Living Boy In Brooklyn is out.

Out is a strong word. There are no physical copies of the record. I did not make vinyl, CDs, or even a T-shirt. Maybe I should. “Out” means that if you search “Ben Lerner music new album” on the internet, hopefully Google will show you some of my new songs.

If you simply search Ben Lerner on Google, you will actually be shown a middle-aged poet and novelist who happens to share my name. I know this because I found him by looking myself up online. Ben Lerner the novelist/poet is a lot more well-known than me. He is a MacArthur Fellow, a best-selling NY Times-reviewed author, and one of my favorite writers. I’ve read his book 10:04 three times. I’d like to think we have some similarities. We are both Jewish. We are both writers. Brooklyn is heavily featured in our respective works. Marketers would recommend that an emerging artist like myself should change my name to something unique like Benito Grobeldeelook. But I don’t mind. If anything, if you search “Ben Lerner” and become a fan of the other Ben Lerner, you will be artistically enriched, something I would wish for everyone.

So out is relative. Most people don’t know about the album. Most who do, didn’t listen. Most who listened, did it once out of respect. Several friends and strangers gave me strong, positive feedback, for which I’m very grateful.

Here's the thing with positive feedback. It’s not even like candy. Candy tastes good, but you regret it later. Positive feedback feels good right before, as it’s starting even, but by the time I feel it, I also feel nothing because I realize that I didn't make this album for anyone. I didn’t even make it for myself.

The Only Living Boy In Brooklyn is not my favorite album. I prefer Songs in the Key of Life by Stevie Wonder. But I’m very proud I did it, simply because it’s something I set out to do a very long time ago.

I remember walking down a busy street in Jerusalem, somewhere near Katamon, or maybe the Old Railway Station. The year was 2014 and I was twenty years old. I was carrying a guitar on my back because I had just finished a lesson with Harvey Brooks, an American music legend who had retired and was giving lessons in Jerusalem. Perhaps seeing my ineptitude on the guitar, or maybe just my desire to express something, he encouraged me to write my own songs. But the songs didn’t come—not good ones at least. Here’s a chorus lyric I still remember:

I want to climb a mountain
Feel the air upon my face
I want to know
How hard it is to climb

I want to climb a mountain
Feel the air upon my face
It’s good to know
I am alive

Clearly, you can hear frustration in the twenty-year-old me. I was frustrated. I was in a yeshiva in Jerusalem that both let me do whatever I wished but also offered a very narrow perspective on what Judaism was about. The idea was, you can take your time and figure yourself out, but when you’re ready to get serious, you are highly encouraged to join us in the Beis Medrash (study hall), where you will spend all day every day, for the rest of your life, analyzing Talmudic texts and praying.

So I took the time. I watched two movies a day. Good ones. My friend Tsvi Shain and I went down the list. Al Pacino: The Godfather, Heat, Scent of a Woman. David Fincher: Fight Club, Seven, The Social Network. Every single Chris Nolan film. Every single Woody Allen movie, which also made me homesick for a New York that I both grew up in and didn’t know existed.

Then it was time for music. The Beatles, Led Zeppelin, Bob Dylan, Steely Dan, John Mayer. I would Google the top ten of each artist, download them at the free Wi-Fi spot at Meir’s Bakery, and marvel. In my second year, I finally smoked my first joint. I was nineteen and terrified. I had a full-on panic attack. But I did it again. Thursday night, my friends and I would stay up all in our Rechavia apartment listening to Pink Floyd. I love Rechavia. It’s a super expensive neighborhood full of empty luxury apartments bought as investments by wealthy Jews from New York. It’s also where my yeshiva was, where I struggled for three years to figure out my place and identity as a young Orthodox Jewish man from a strong yeshiva background.

I learned as well. There were good chunks of time where I would wake up on time every morning and study Gemara with my chavrusa (study partner). I would go to shiur (lecture). But even in my most studious era, where I would learn for many hours in the morning and evening, I dedicated my afternoons to practicing guitar and trying to write good songs.

Jerusalem is a spiritual place. You can feel God like nowhere else. I did. I prayed to God that He give me the ability to be a songwriter. I was not a songwriter yet. I sucked. But I believed in the power of prayer. I believed that God loved me and had my best interest at heart. I believed that God wouldn’t create someone with such a strong desire for creative expression without actually having the ability to do it.

But it took more than prayer. I’m not going to write my entire biography here—that’s for another time—but my album isn’t called The Only Living Boy In Jerusalem. I could have been. I wanted to stay. I wanted to be a quasi-religious singer-songwriter-musician who lived in an English-speaking religious community in Israel. But I also realized the limitations of being in that community. Many of the English speakers, people who didn't really integrate into any segment of Israeli society, seemed to be perpetual outcasts. Most struggled financially. Many were simply getting off on the fact that they managed to stay in Israel. This was the highest goal for them. For me, the highest goal was finding my artistic voice. I couldn’t be in any sort of cult. I couldn’t be limited. Eventually, Israel started to feel small. It is small. It’s tiny. You can walk the entire Jerusalem in a couple of hours. So I went back to New York and eventually met my beautiful wife Mimi.

What God, Jerusalem, and my guitar teachers couldn’t seem to do for me, my wife did. I had a home here. I had a place where I could fully be myself. The better songs started coming. The first one I released, in 2019, was “Jordan,” which was a song from the perspective of someone who attended a lecture by Jordan Peterson. Mimi shot the music video. There are many themes in that song—too many, actually. But what I was trying to say was that this constant need to have strong charismatic role models was impeding my ability to think and be myself. I had been bouncing around from mentor to mentor (mentor = tormentor) trying to get someone’s permission to simply be. I needed relief from the stringencies of Orthodoxy.

I grew up in a culture where English lyrics were only about strengthening one’s commitment to Judaism. I wanted to say something of my own; I didn’t even know what yet. Marriage finally allowed me this luxury. I was in my own apartment with my wife overlooking the ocean in Far Rockaway, NY. I was blessed with the ability to support myself by giving music lessons to other kids. I didn’t have to see rabbis or my parents on a daily basis anymore.

The songs began to come. I wrote “Young Boy,” which is a social commentary on the enthusiasm and speed with which young people in my community marry. It’s still one of my favorites. I’m not pro or against getting married young or quickly. I simply wanted to point out a way in which my community differs so strongly from the secular world. It’s fascinating because the average American millennial or Gen Z takes their mighty time getting married, having children, and finding a career that works for them. But in my community, it seems to happen so fast with such self-belief and a seeming lack of introspection. For me, that’s hard because I love taking my time.

Is my music Jewish music? To some, yes though I don’t try to pitch my English songs to Jewish platforms. I woke up this morning thinking about how popular Israeli religious artist Ishai Ribo doesn’t seem to have songs directly begging God to end the two-thousand-year Jewish exile. Many of the English Jewish songs I grew up on did. Ribo lives in a religious-Zionist world, where through the founding of the State of Israel, Redemption has already begun. Sure, there are massive issues that require prayer and attention, but we are still miles ahead of where we were when most Jews lived in the diaspora. Many Orthodox Jews resonate with Ribo’s songs despite not even having enough Hebrew language skills to understand the nuances. Yet they resonate with it so strongly and so much deeper than anything made by Ribo’s American counterparts who are supposedly supposed to write Jewish music. If you look closely, many of the American Orthodox artists have done very little significant work in the past two years. Why is that?

I had a great conversation yesterday with my father-in-law about how the internet has distorted our definition of community. We are seemingly in many places at once. Everything is a “community.” The disc golf community, the Bigger Pockets community, the FIRE community, the KILL TONY community, or the music community—these are all digital spaces full of video content and discussions by thousands of people and very occasional in-person meetups. You can live anywhere and be “part” of it all. And then there’s the Jewish community where I grew up, where physical space is everything, where you must live walking distance to a synagogue, kosher food, and private Jewish schools. And yet so many of us in the community have our minds in some distant online world that speaks to us more than anything that's actually in our physical space. In a sense, the religious Jew is programmed for this. “Libi BaMizrach”—My heart is in Jerusalem—says the devout 19th-century Jew who’s never left his hamlet in Poland.

So what’s my album, The Only Living Boy in Brooklyn? Maybe it’s the direct opposite of Ishai Ribo’s work. Maybe it’s the story of someone who failed to make it in God’s favorite city and whose need for self-exploration and expression dragged him back to Brooklyn, the most famous and benevolent Jewish exile. It’s an album of someone in deep golus (exile). It’s available in the dark void of the internet. It’s out.