New York native Benny Bleu is something of a Renaissance man and also something of a Luddite, two states of being that don’t generally mix. But he’s been a geologist and is now a full time singer songwriter and banjo picker, who doesn’t own a smart phone and chooses to travel by train rather than car. He is rooted in the old time tradition but on this album When I Am A Fossil is a sort of gentle contemporary Americana that lyrically packs a bit of a punch.
Bleu is joined by collaborators who are as multi-instrumental as he is on this mostly acoustic affair whose vibe is at times reminiscent of the ’70s hippy stringband classic Have Moicy!. Out front is Gus Tritsch on fiddle, guitar and mandolin; Huck Tritsch, himself an award winning fiddler, plays drums and doubles on the Rhodes (as does Bleu); and Eric Heveron-Smith plays bass. Pretty much all of them help out on vocals, as does Katie Martucci of The Ladles.
The fare here ranges from humanist earth-friendly songs informed by Bleu’s scientific background and his streak of pure humanism, to anti-capitalist ballads to instrumentals that draw equally on bluegrass, old-time and jazz — both Huck Tritsch and Heveron-Smith have deep grounding in jazz. Thus we get a credible fiddle-forward cover of Joe Zawinul’s soulful groove “Mercy, Mercy, Mercy” that was a big hit for Cannonball Adderley (with Bleu’s banjo taking the piano comp), and the lovely waltz-time “Fairy Shrimp” that pairs Bleu’s claw-hammer banjo with Gus’s finger-picked electric guitar over the lightly swinging groove from that jazzy rhythm section.
The environmental and humanist tone is set by the opening title track that Bleu explains like this: “How might a scientist from the deep future know we were here? Surely any advanced being that finds evidence of our great experiment would be impressed by how much stuff we accumulated! And surely they would be confused why we needed it all.” It’s carried on in the world music informed “All I Want To Be” that combines awe at the universe with a zen attitude and some possible lyrical shout-outs to some ’90s rockers. The environmental anthem “Serenity Song,” was on his first album Warm Prickly and picked up by Putumayo for its Folk Cafe release; he’s repurposed it here with a warmer tone and some ringing electric guitar, which may help emphasize the strands of hope among the lyrics of human guilt and grief over our planet’s condition.
Two of the other covers are of folk songs that were popular among the Lefties during the original folk music scare. “Penny’s Farm” is an indictment of the miseries of sharecropping, although here its subversive message is cloaked in a warm Cajun shuffle. My favorite track is the cover of Ola Belle and David Reed’s “I’ve Endured,” an Appalachian declaration of strength in the face of economic and environmental exploitation. Not to put too fine a point on it, it was released as a single on April 15, tax day in the U.S. Katie Martucci’s harmony vocals here are particularly strong. “We gathered around an ancient RCA 44 ribbon and tracked this song live so we could feel the harmonies in our skulls,” Bleu says.
(Benny Bleu, 2026)
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