Ben Arsenault strips down and goes it alone in the great outdoors in the intimate live video for his new breakup single Grand Forks — showcasing today on Tinnitist.
The scene-setting opening track from the Vancouver singer-songwriter’s latest album Make Way For This Heartache, Grand Forks shares a timeless, tender tale of gracefully letting go of lost love and moving on with your head held high. And this field recording from a B.C. shoreline perfectly illustrates the song’s sense of bittersweet solitude, bypassing the recording-studio middlemen with a solo acoustic take that cuts right to the heart of the tune’s emotional chase:
“Broken heart to peace of mind
Get up buddy hold your head up high
Always looking for what you can’t find
Leave it all behind
I’ll leave you now, I’ve seen you enough in my dreams
I’m headed out of Grand Forks, starting clean
The sun rises over the lake and I feel free
It’s a choice that I’ve made.”
Since releasing his fittingly titled album Make Way For This Heartache this summer, Arsenault has quickly become one of Canada’s most vital new voices within the international Americana scene. That momentum is sure to keep building with Grand Forks, which encapsulates the album’s vintage vibes while showing off Arsenault’s classic style.
Make Way For This Heartache was produced at Vancouver’s Afterlife Studios and features an all-star cast of Canadian and American musicians, including pedal steel maestros Caleb Melo and Scott Smith, City & Colour members Erik Nielsen, Matt Kelly and John Sponarski, drummer Leon Power (Frazey Ford) and Marin Patenaude adding harmony vocals.
In essence, Make Way For This Heartache sums up Arsenault’s musical journey to date. It began about 15 years ago when he made his first impression as singer-guitarist with Real Ponchos, Vancouver’s long-standing psychedelic country-rockers, but Arsenault’s interest in country music started early through exploring his grandfather’s record collection that included Hank Williams, Ray Price and Lefty Frizzell. One of his strongest childhood memories was hearing his father sing Hank Sr. songs while they walked in the woods to let bears know they were coming — something Ben does to this day.
Later, Arsenault moved to Montreal, where he first took to the stage and found his voice. But as the lure of the bright lights began to fade and a longing for the wilderness of the West Coast set in, Arsenault dug deeper into classic country, at first through Grateful Dead covers of Merle Haggard and Marty Robbins songs, which encouraged him to throw the doors of interpretation wide open, and led to the formation of Real Ponchos.
It’s all come together on Make Way For This Heartache, a soothing balm for broken hearts and unfulfilled dreams. The truth and hurting that the record embodies is as old as humanity. “These are all songs that I love to sing, and many of them I have been singing and performing for years,” Arsenault says. “They’re songs that have stood the test of time; songs that have become less about the experiences in my life that inspired them, and more about life itself.”
Watch the video for Grand Forks above, hear the rest of Make Way For This Heartache below, and follow Ben Arsenault on Facebook and Instagram.
