Every family has their skeletons in the closet. Family reunions sometimes bring baggage to light, whether it's because Uncle Tom got sent to prison or cousin Joey got sent to military school because he didn't know how to keep his hands to himself or maybe little Susie got kicked out of the house because she got caught kissing little Mary from down the street. Lies being passed on from generation to generation. Fights that will never be reconciled. Every family has their secrets and their drama.
Ben Cooper, lead musician of the band Radical Face, brought that to light during his eight-year project called The Family Tree, which is a three part story told through music instead of a traditional narrative. The three albums that compose of this are The Roots, The Branches and The Leaves.
The beginning of this family narrative starts on the first album, The Roots, with a song called "Family Portrait." It follows the story of a family named the Northcotes who were alive in the 1800s and each song after this one tells the journey of specific characters. Every song on every album in the series is a stem from "Family Portrait". The songs that couldn't fit onto each of the albums along the way were tied together into a sort of mini series called The Bastards. To follow this story line, Ben created a website for the sole purpose of being able to follow certain journeys of individual characters and wrote a book which serves as a guide book for the albums.
At first listen, these songs out of context don't make any sense at all, though each song tells a little tale. When I first started listening to Radical Face a few years ago, I thought one of the songs ("Ghost Towns") off the Roots album was very different instrumentally and quite intriguing. There were all sorts of instruments being used that you wouldn't typically hear in a regular song, no matter how "hipster" the song may be such as string instruments and what I thought to be an accordion, only to find out later it was a neat little instrument called a melodica, which is basically just a harmonica with a keyboard. The style of music also pulled me in, so I listened to more songs. Though I didn't really know what the vocalist was singing about, I enjoyed the songs. It wasn't until recently that I discovered there was an entire commentary about the third installment of the Family Tree project, so I listened. Ben explained each song on the Leaves album as well as its meaning. He shared some of his own personal experiences, too, and it made me realize something.
Everyone's family has history, whether it's good or bad. Nobody's family is perfect. What really hit home after spending my time learning about this project is the fact that every family has a certain type of struggle, but blood will always be thicker than water.
