Ben Stalets finds beauty in the everyday

Ben Stalets came to music a bit later in life, first picking up a guitar at age 20 when he was struck by a vision in which he played a song for a room full of people that was at once funny and sad, and that left an immediate impression on everyone with the good fortune to hear it.

“And lo and behold, I’m nearly two decades into it and I’ve never been to a party where somebody’s pulled out a guitar and asked me to play a song,” Stalets said, and laughed. “And furthermore, as many times as I’ve been like, ‘Wow, I wrote a good song,’ I’m still chasing that dragon of trying to write that one good song that will make people laugh and cry.”

While this aim has remained consistent, Stalets said the forces moving him to create have evolved in myriad, unanticipated ways. As a younger man, the folk musician idolized the likes of Townes Van Zandt and Bob Dylan, believing that his musical journey would be accompanied by a similarly surreal lifestyle. Now, he describes this idea as “an illusion” at odds with the reality of tour life, which generally involves long drives alone, daily struggles to find a place to lay your head, and endless prayers that you get enough sleep to preserve the energy needed to do it all again the next day.

“And I just don’t see how any of that’s possible when you’re acting frivolous. Not that I was searching for the rock ‘n’ roll lifestyle in particular … but I thought that chasing these songs was going to get me that, and it didn’t,” said Stalets, who visits Rambling House for a concert on Sunday, Jan. 19, joined by Hello Emerson. “But the positive side is that it got me something different. It gave me a sense of responsibility and a sense of community and a bunch of other words that I was never expecting to say.”

The troubadour types to which Stalets gravitated had a pronounced influence on his early songwriting, leading the Toledo native to sing about jagged mountain ranges, open Western vistas and wild, windswept ocean shores – landscapes entirely foreign to his Northwestern Ohio home. Looking back, Stalets now understands that in some ways he leaned into this kind of writing as a means of escaping the place from which he came, acknowledging that he didn’t begin to find himself as a writer until he learned to embrace his roots.

“I felt like I needed to be bigger and smarter than the people I grew up around, and not because I thought that they were dumb, but because I had an ego,” Stalets said. “And once I started being myself, and writing how I speak with my friends, everything just started to make so much more sense.”

One turning point arrived when Stalets made a pilgrimage to Van Zandt’s gravesite while on tour in Texas, during which he was struck by a vision of the late singer, who told him, “Leave me alone, man.”

“And I was like, you know what? I should,” said Stalets, who began to seek some musical distance from these early heroes on songs such as “Stone.” Written by Stalets about an elementary school friend who died tragically in a grain silo accident as a young man, the tune is deeply felt, its plainspoken words delivered entirely without artifice. “Your wife and daughter reflect you,” Stalets sings on the track, preserved on the 2023 concert album Live at the Sub Shop, “every time that I’m back home.”

“I think I just had this revelation that I had just been trying to be somebody I wasn’t for too long. And that sounds more profound than it actually was,” the musician said. “I was leaving my 20s, and your 20s are a time of exploration. I mean, don’t know many 20-year-olds who know who they are. And I think it was just a matter of me recognizing that I wasn’t who I thought I was, and then also tamping down some of my ego. And I’m not saying I don’t have an ego now – I mean, we’re doing an interview about me – but I was less in touch with myself, and I think I thought I was cooler than I actually was.”

Stalets said he grew up with a fascination for language, recalling how his dad once told him that the best way to communicate with another person is through writing a letter. As an only child, he also found escape in literature, particularly when he encountered something where the author’s experiences reflected his own, or when the language they used was more stripped down and better evoked the way the people around Stalets spoke. 

“And that experience, it felt like magic on Earth. It felt divine,” said Stalets, who now strives for similar relatability in his own work. “Maybe my favorite compliment I’ve gotten was when someone came up to me after a show, and they said, ‘Man, it feels like we went to school together, like we know all the same people.’ And he was saying that just through hearing my songs, where I was talking about people he absolutely did not know. And in some way, I guess that’s become part of my mission statement.”