It wasn’t until I had a couple of milestone breakthroughs
that I even got any good at it.”
Ironically, it was likely the hyperfocus (courtesy of
Benjamin’s Asperger Syndrome) that assisted him.
“My teacher realized that when he numbered my fingers
on the page, I was able to play better than when he just
wrote out the notes. And the reason is that I see every-
thing as a numbers game. For every piano piece I play, I
put the melody not to a note, but to a number. And so I
obsess about those number patterns. And I think in those
terms. … My obsession with these particular patterns
has given me a unique perspective on how music works, I
think, separate from a lot of other people.”
Like most kids, he hated practicing, but he felt “a rush” as
he rapidly progressed from rudimentary pieces to
expert-level works.
“It made me feel good the same way keeping up with my
parents at the dinner table would. It was a different form
of proving myself in a different arena.”
That said, Benjamin readily admits that he resented the
fact that his parents wanted him to perform all the time.
“I kind of internalized it and made it my own struggle …
It shifted from proving to people outside of me that I was
good enough … and [I] became intrinsically motivated to
pursue music and write lyrics at a level where I thought I
was worthy of not even just the Irving Berlin legacy, but
what I began to perceive as this lineage of writers and
musicians.”
Benjamin also loved writing poetry from a young age.
According to his mother, Mary Ellin Lerner, “When
he was eight years old, he started writing poetry.
I remember the first poem, because he composed it in
the backseat of the car on a grocery receipt. It was called,
‘The Soul’… It was a beautiful, very profound, spiritu-
al poem. This was in third grade! And it just kept going
from there. So, he began at age eight, and I think
by the time he was nine, he had a poem published, called
‘Music’, of all things, in a collection of young poets.
He was writing poems left and right … and they were
brilliant and very precocious, and they never stopped …
until high school, when the poems turned into raps.”
Benjamin explains, “I first heard rap when I was young,
and I loved it. I loved the energy, I loved the kind of
animal magnetism in the vocal. Separate from any
melody - and I do like melody - but I am a real ‘harmony
and base’ person. It might be because I’m left handed -
and when I was taught piano, my left hand was
always stronger. But I was about eight or nine when
I first consciously heard rap music. It was Project
Pat of Memphis, Three 6 Mafia, and Eminem. They
were the first rappers I liked. I remember hearing the
poetry - both simple and powerful - in terms of the
South rap and the complex and multi-syllabic in
terms of Midwest (Eminem, Twista), and like the 90s
golden age rap poets, like Notorious B.I.G., Nas, AZ, Big
L. and from age 9 to 14, it kind of sound-tracked my life.
I had a hard time socially adjusting, but I would put on
Eminem and relate to the struggles that he talks about with
family and with feeling like an outsider. [I didn’t try to rap
myself] until I was drunk at a party when I was 15 or 16,
and my other friends were passing a joint around and they
were cyphering (coming up with improvised freestyle rap
poetry). I just did it out of pure lack of inhibition and love
of music. They laughed at me. My nickname was ‘Skinny’.
And they said, “Yeah, Skinny, that’s hilarious.’ But - in the
same way I wanted to
prove myself at the
dinner
table earlier, I
wanted to
prove to them
and say, ‘Hey, you
know who I am?
I’m a classical piano
player.
I’m a poet.
I can do this.
This is nothing’.
41 VTMAG.com