Photo by Drake Li
Faced with a excess of spare time and forcibly separated from creative co-conspirators by vast geographical distance as a result of the global pandemic, Been Stellar drew inspiration from an unlikely source for their latest track — the 250-year-old autobiographical descriptions of Benjamin Franklin’s daily routine. Billing itself as a short story, “The Poets” strings together a loosely connected series of vignettes that pull back the curtain on the routine machinations of each band members’ everyday life isolated in quarantine.
Arguably this country’s most interesting founding father, Benjamin Franklin famously extolled the virtues of wine, women, and song alongside revolutionary political philosophy across his many published works. In addition to his penchant for earthly pleasures, Franklin was also well known for his high levels of personal and professional productivity. Written across the span of 20 years in the waning days of the 18th century, Franklin (in)famously outlined the secret of his disciple with a fascinatingly vague diagram. Essentially the colonial version of South Park gnomes’ underpants business plan, Franklin’s daily routine has both inspired and confounded scholars and high performing individuals for hundreds of years.
Been Stellar takes Franklin’s guidance to heart, aspiring to fill their suddenly COVID-cleared calendars with endless creative expression within a structured regimen, quickly determining that staying on task can prove difficult when there are just so many hours available. High and fuzzed out guitars bounce against rattling percussion and springy basslines in the blistering sub-3-minute track. The result feels like an early Strokes outtake injected with a lethal dose of stir crazy and confined to a too-small spare bedroom in your parent’s house. A rotating lineup of time-wasting hobbies fly by with flip-book speed. Low-poly retro video games, ambitious cooking experiments, and endless blocks of book-print interspersed with footage of the band doing their best to express themselves in from the disturbingly normal confines of American suburbia details the inherent desire to adhere to a routine, anything to maintain one’s sanity in these (pardon the cliché) unprecedented times.
Where Franklin’s writings served as the ideological foundation of this country and have endured the test of time, Been Stellar question the longevity and cultural impact of their own creative output with the over-caffeinated nuance of youthful nihilism born of cultural overstimulation. “Drop pen! your words, your thoughts they don’t matter! Your monologues they don’t matter!” belts Sam Slocum beneath the torrential downpour of a shower head, raging against the futility of creation by committing fully to the act of creation itself. Expression, pressing against the confines of obscurity in the valiant effort to break through into the pages of human eternity is the ultimate goal. Even if no once notices the mark has been made, and the smallest flaps of a butterfly’s wings may conjure a cultural hurricane if the conditions are ripe. Step 1, write songs. Step 2, ??? Step 3, PROFIT!! Just stick to the plan and everything will work out in the end. Maybe.
Been Stellar’s appropriately titled debut EP, ‘Nihilsm’, is out October 9. Follow the band on Instagram, purchase their catalog on Bandcamp or stream on Spotify.
