For singer-songwriter 1010benja, genius happens spontaneously, involuntarily, and,
possibly, divinely. “It’s like in the Bible, when God says, ‘I’ll come like a thief in the
night… No man shall know the date or the hour,’” he says. “Well, this is how it works
with the best songs. They just come.”
Ten Total, the forthcoming debut record from 1010, assembles just these kinds of
lightning strikes. Recorded over the past couple years between his bedroom in Kansas
City and Los Angeles studios, the album plays not unlike a punk record: ten songs,
back-to-back and to the point, showcasing the outer limit of the artist’s skill, passions,
and curiosities up to that day. The throughline here, however, is a pristine,
room-stopping R&B vocal, honed during 1010benja’s years spent in the gospel church
and busking on city streets, employed with all the mastery of pop music’s canonical
singers. It was this voice that magnetized the industry toward his sound in 2017, when
he released “Boofiness,” a six-minute piano ballad with a Magic City bounce—it caught
the ear of press at Pitchfork, the New York Times, Pigeons and Planes, Dazed and more,
and influential BBC DJ Benji B became a vocal champion. But little was still known
about 1010: his subsequent releases, including 2018’s “Two Houses” EP, have felt as
nomadic as their author, brimming with spirit and impossible to tie down.
The artist has been glimpsing toward the unknown since childhood. Growing up in
Tulsa, OK, 1010 spent nearly all of his time in Pentecostal and C.O.G.I.C churches,
where his parents served as ministers and congregation members. He absorbed the
message and the music. “Like 4 to 8 hours a day, most days a week,” he recalls. “My
earliest memories are falling asleep on my mother’s breast, and hearing her heartbeat,
and her voice humming in one ear, and the band blaring in that other ear.” Religion
shaped his worldview in more ways than one. There was an interest in the metaphysical
and ancient history, cultivated by his immersion in scripture, but also the church
tradition itself, a connection to black culture informed by his father, uncles, and
grandfather, who’s histories as clergy-men traversed the Black American south and
midwest.
The backdrop of Tulsa further molded 1010’s unique slant on the world: born to a black
father and white mother, both from the working class, he learned early that economic
lines ran just as starkly as racial ones. He tested into the historic magnet school Booker
T. Washington High in North Tulsa, “BTW was one of the first High Schools in the
region to desegregate in the 70s, it was known as a magnet school so kids who got
accepted were bussed in from all over the city, it was a place where the kids from the
hood and from the suburbs could meet in one place and study chinese, latin and Ralph
Ellison in the same day.” As a teen, his search for freedom and agency, beyond the
church walls, soon led him to Tulsa’s punk scene, where he fronted bands and learned to
play rock guitar. He found inspiration in the gnostic work and life of John Frusciante,
surrealist literature ,and contemporary art, which led him to New York, and then LA.
With gobs of talent and hunger but little source of steady income, he found himself
floating between avant-garde art circles and the abyss of transience. “At a point, I
became so lonely that the only people I had to talk to were the great dead writers and
artists,” he says. “And that’s when I became obsessed with knowledge and information,
and started reifying my own mind as a buffer between my heart and the constrictions of
the real world.”
With Ten Total, due March 2024 on Three Six Zero Recordings/SME, 1010 begins to
expose this inner language. His take on pop is straightforward, until you listen closely.
On “Peacekeeper,” he employs a hasty Detroit street-rap flow to namedrop Star Trek
and the art film work of Matthew Barney. On “Waterworks,” we encounter the dual
nature of good and bad, self-love and self-abuse. And impassioned love songs, like
“Twin” and the single “H2HAVEYOU,” provide the heart of the project: blissed out
hand-in-hand anthems that catalogue the free-fall of falling in love. His fixation with the
number “10” nods to a divine completeness, the union of two sides (“1010”): love and
sex are potent muses throughout his work. It is here that, if not in sound, his rock core
endures in spirit. “That's rock and rolling,” he says. "You know, rock and rolling. You're
you're you're literally moving and shaking, in congress with life and love. That's what
that shit means. I like that Luciferian rebellion that Muddy Waters was holding down,
that you would hear from Jimmy [Hendrix]. That, just, nasty stuff I guess. Unhinged.
Like coming right out of the belly of the beast. Like a bat out of hell.”