Benjamin Burdon Breaks Five-Year Hiatus with Refreshed Name, New Single

When Benjamin Burdon first started working on his forthcoming project five years ago, he did so amidst a personal crisis.

Living in Chicago’s Humboldt Park neighborhood during the pandemic, Burdon was grappling with compounded loss. A couple of long-term friendships were fizzling out, including a falling out with one of his most steady collaborators.

And despite the joy she brought him, the stress of a newborn baby girl didn’t exactly free up his emotional bandwidth. When both of his grandfathers passed within a month of each other in 2021, Burdon turned to his music to process.

“It was this journey of understanding what death meant to me,” he recalled to Queen City Nerve. “Everybody’s dying around me. I have family members dying. People are getting sick.”

But while it may seem trite to remark that grief is never linear, that well-worn phrase revealed its truth to Burdon. By the end of 2021, he had to move back in with family in Charlotte after job loss expended his possibilities in Chicago.

He was making music throughout that time, flexing his production muscles alongside his songwriting. The resulting work, however, felt too preciously intimate to release.

For the first time in five years, Burdon is ready to let the world into this body of work, starting with his new single “I Wanna See You,” which will release on July 22.

“Things end, things come, things go,” he mused. “[The project is] about coming to terms with the reality that everything ends.”

“I Wanna See You” opens over modulating distorted piano chords and a sparse electronic drumbeat before Burdon comes in with his signature falsetto. Rather than the traditional pop verse-chorus structure, the single mirrors jazz’s contrapuntal structure.

Specifically in bebop (think 1940s and 1950s artists Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie) or modal jazz (think 1950s and 1960s artists like John Coltrane and Miles Davis), the lead musician would establish a melodic motif that the band would then individually “remark” upon with their solos.

The structure is circular in distinction from pop’s linear setup, repeating the initial pattern with differences as the song progresses.

Burdon, who performed and produced the track, intentionally structured “I Wanna See You” in this tradition, echoing experimentation from his earlier projects, The Concrete Maze (2017) and Dead Skin Kiss (2020). Inspired by musicians like Miles Davis and songwriters like D’Angelo and Thom Yorke of Radiohead, Burdon manipulates structure while remaining true to the pop idiom.

“Although the themes and the sounds are in some ways kind of outside of traditional pop structures, I still love pop music,” he said.

The song riffs on two major sonic patterns. This first pattern repeats “I wanna see you” in differing contexts, capturing the play between fear and desire when losing a lover or dear friend. He starts by baring the purity of his desire with the piquancy of pain that comes with fresh loss.

“Grind all day, I wanna see you…” which he intensifies in the second cycle with a plea, “Could you look my way? I wanna see you…”

By the third cycle, he acknowledges the abandonment, unconvincingly demurring from the pain: “You made a new best friend, still wanna see you/ How’s it been? How’s he treat you?/ It’s ok, fine by me…”

By the fourth cycle, it seems as if he’s changing his relationship to loss, wearing the pain more like a loose garment than a shackle. “Every second day, still wanna see you/ Made my way, no release/ What’s the point? We’ll never see…”

At this point, the track opens into its second sonic theme, sort of like an extended bridge marked by a different chord structure and vocal delivery style. Burdon peppers in phrases from the first section in between new lines, phrases that become increasingly distorted as the song progresses.

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A phone rings over his musings, eternally unanswered. Every four bars, a new instrument or element is added, slowly building energy. By the end of the song, we’re swept up in the noisy, circular chaos of grief, shoved out into its loneliness.

An ethereal bassline swells, echoes and fades as the track concludes, mimicking the agonizingly unpredictable contractions of loss.

Throughout the track, we experience a grief that changes you if you can survive it. Burdon himself has come out the other side changed, shifting his stage name from Ben Burden to Benjamin Burdon (pronounced “bur-dawn”).

The name change is so significant that his earlier work as Ben Burden exists as a completely separate profile on streaming platforms from his new work as Benjamin Burdon, which thus far only includes his features on Cyanca’s “Get That Bag” and Charlotte collective Whonoz’s “Killing Me Softly.”

Tired of the negative connotations of “burden,” Benjamin dug into his Louisiana creole roots and found that “Bourdon” — a variation of his name — referred to a pilgrim’s staff in French.

“I’ve moved every two years of my life, really, until I landed here…I feel like a pilgrim in some sense,” he explained.

At the other end of this pilgrimage, he has embraced his full name, stepping into a new era as an artist. As he’s readying himself to release an album this fall, the release of “I Wanna See You” provides just a taste of that five-year sojourn.

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