Trace Mountains is scaling new heights

Into The Burning Blue, Dave Benton’s fourth album under the Trace Mountains moniker, is his most ambitious yet. The days of the singer-songwriter’s country-inspired bedroom recordings are firmly in the past: in their place are nods to widescreen ‘80s rock gods Tom Petty and Bruce Springsteen. The album conjures images of wide open roads and endless possibilities while Benton himself is going through some form of hell, plundering the dying embers of a relationship and picking himself up to go again.

There have always been hints of boldness on Benton’s solo recordings ever since he began releasing them following the dissolution of his band LVL UP. On the 2018 album A Partner To Lean On highlight “Turn Twice” he layered his vocals in Auto-Tune and played with drum machines to create a crunchy, digitized form of communication. 2020’sLost In The Country, meanwhile, packs alien synths and howling feedback into the gaps between his lovingly crafted and introspective songs. The production on Burning Blue is comparatively clear and puts Trace Mountains firmly in the lane as bands like The War On Drugs and My Morning Jacket have come to call their own in the last decade.

Speaking earlier this month via Zoom, Benton is thoughtful and considerate of the reasons for the change in sound, chiefly his long term love of Petty and a desire to move away from the country-adjacent sound many indie artists have leaned into in recent years. “I felt like I got it out of my system,” he says when it comes to the idea of writing a song for pedal steel guitar again. He also discussed his side gig teaching songwriting classes and the recent 10th anniversary shows he played with his former LVL UP bandmates.

The FADER: Tell me about the headspace you were in while writing Into The Burning Blue.

Dave Benton: I wrote it while straddling the end of a relationship. A lot of the time I write songs about things that I'm feeling that I don't really realize at the time. About half of the songs on the album started that way, songs where I thought I was writing about something else but eventually became a window into my actual feelings on the situation.

There's a song called “Crawling Back to You.” I was really into that Tom Petty album, Wildflowers. A friend told me about how Petty would take words from other songs and recontextualized them in his lyrics so that's what I was trying to do with that one as a way of writing more generally about people's struggles with addiction. That's not something that is personal to my life but was in the back of my mind. I wanted to write a song about that and looking back now I can see I was drawing from my situation of feeling stuck.

Then half of the songs were written directly in the aftermath of that [break-up] and just trying to give myself some kind of creative routine in order to feel good.

There is a notable change in sound from House of Confusion and the other albums you have put out. How would you describe the sound of this new album?

There is a big ‘80s pop and rock influence on the album. It’s one of the main reasons I wanted to work with [producer] Craig Hendrix, who is in Japanese Breakfast. That music, Petty, Bruce Springsteen, was one of the very first things we discussed when we started working together on new music. I knew he could help me execute this more ‘80s rock vision that I had.

What do you think was pushing you in that direction?

I had a false start a year earlier with some songs, including “Crawling Back To You,” that had that folk country sound I was leaning into in the past. I just thought I wanted to do something bigger and different this time. I think I saw a lot of my peers and people that I looked up to doing the country thing and doing it really, really well. That's kind of the music that I really tend to gravitate towards, but I was thinking about the music that I used to make as a kid and wanted to go for this pop-rock thing. I thought it would be fun to go back to what I was originally chasing and let other people do that country thing.

You have mentioned Tom Petty, and his lyrics in particular, as a major influence. What is it that makes him stand out to you as a songwriter?

I love listening to Wildflowers. It is his divorce album and at that time in my life it just worked for me. There is a simplicity to songs like “Hard On Me” and “To Find A Friend” that really resonates with me, a guy in his early 30s who was so into maintaining this relationship to the detriment of my friendships and really losing touch with people. I was having a hard time with that and not really understanding how that was affecting me on a deeper emotional level.

“In A Dream” began as a prompt in a songwriting workshop you teach. Can you remember what that initial prompt was?

I teach these classes on Zoom, just small group workshops with, like, five people in them. We often pair up and give each other prompts so one of my students, Ethan, gave me this recording that he made of these frog mating sounds from a river. And he was like, ‘incorporate this.’ I had the guitar part already and I was chopping up the sample that he gave me and made a little soundscape with that. It wasn't really a prompt that was designed to get any specific lyrics out of me or anything like that. You can kind of hear it, though. It's like the glitchy kind of sounding tape thing that comes in every now and again.

“Friend” is another standout moment on the album. What role do you see that song playing?

That is just such a direct lyrical moment. I think it’s the only song I have ever written that came out of me in one day. It felt really sad to me but also good to get it out of my head.

And then there is “Hard to Accept.” That song feels like a turn in a more optimistic direction…

Yeah, definitely. It’s about a breakdown of communication and also my hopes for the future but also being a little bit naive and hoping that things are going to get better. That's where my head goes with it. It’s the ‘OK, we're moving on’ moment on the album. Like, ‘This is hard, but we're just doing it and let’s see what happens.’

Finally, you just played a series of 10th anniversary shows with LVL Up. How was that experience?

It was so cool. Mike [Caridi] texted me last year and said the 10 year anniversary of [2014 album] Hoodwink’d was coming up and would we be interested in doing a repress. That conversation then grew into the idea of playing live again. It had been a while since we all hung out and it just felt good to be back together again and to look back on the band. It was definitely unexpected that we could play that many shows in New York, too, but we were having a good time and just wanted to keep it going.