A few months ago, I got the opportunity to sit down with Ben Grey of Dear Boy at The Bootleg and have a little chat. In honor of Dear Boy’s show at the Echo tonight, here is a taste of what happened…

A: So, Ben.

B: Yes dear.

A: Tell me about how Dear Boy came to life and the inspiration for the name.

B: Okay. They’re two separate stories. Um, how the band came together… Basically, I’ve known all these guys and worked with them in some capacity for a really long time and I always wanted to put them all together. But it was the first time we were all musically single so I kind of felt like it was fine to ask them out, officially of course.  And then I absconded with them to the UK and that’s how that started. But as far as the name, um, everyone think that it’s the Paul McCartney song or like a smaller group of people think that it’s the Keith Moon book but uh, it really came down to… a waitress said it in the UK. We were there on Thanksgiving and we had been living there for three months or something, and uh we’re in an Italian restaurant cause we had no family there, we had nothing going on so we… the waitress, she was talking to us a few times said, “oh you. Oh, dear boy”, and then that was like, oh my God that’s the name that we were looking for, for this thing

A: Serendipity.

B: Yeah, it was cosmic. Not so much of Paul McCartney’s song, which is great.

A. Cool. Um, I was wondering if at all, how did the time in London affect or influence the sound of the band?

B: It had a huge influence on the band and everything that we wrote there. Basically, I guess. What I say sometimes is that I was desperate to be displaced. And when you start something new… I mean, for me I wanted to be by myself and really really…. (Sighs) I wanted to be not around anything that was my old life because I really wanted to do something different. So, aside from the fact that all American musicians like to romanticize the UK, which is just sort of, at this point cliché, um I just… we had a small opportunity there, like a really tiny one, to play a residency there because my friend was a booking agent and we were just like, we are going to move there and it was just one of those ‘leap and it will appear situations’ and once we did we were alone and just with the city and in a very tiny flat with no heat and no tv and no internet and it was like, it acted as the best distiller. So over that period that we lived in London, everything about it influenced and shaped the record and really helped purify the sentiment and the main, I don’t know, the main innovations.

 

Stay tuned for more from the interview!