Ambitious in scope yet intimately confiding, Clutching At Straws is a wide-angle glimpse into both the light and the shadow of human attachments.

Spurred by divorce and all the attendant fallout – Clutching At Straws traverses themes from love to obsession, sensuality to despair, liberation to claustrophobia, elation to desperation. Taken as a

Ambitious in scope yet intimately confiding, Clutching At Straws is a wide-angle glimpse into both the light and the shadow of human attachments.

Spurred by divorce and all the attendant fallout – Clutching At Straws traverses themes from love to obsession, sensuality to despair, liberation to claustrophobia, elation to desperation. Taken as a whole, the album plays akin to a movie soundtrack, with a broad sweep of styles ranging from folk to glam rock, and lyrical proclivities lending nod to Dylan-esque wordplay on the one hand and the colorful theatrics of Stephen Sondheim on the other.

Jon James Is Dead is the moniker for Minneapolis singer-songwriter and multi-instrumentalist J.J. Benson. Clutching At Straws pays nod to a number of genres while remaining cohesive by virtue of Benson’s voice and accomplished guitar & piano work. Whereas Benson’s past ventures have been compared to everyone from Ryan Adams to Todd Rundgren, the new album is noticeably more intimate and immediate.

“All these songs essentially began as bedroom songs,” says Benson. “I’d play them quietly in my room, late at night. I wanted to try and retain that feel as we moved to recording them. Many of them began as just voice and acoustic guitar, as one-off performances. And some of those songs, like Sad Solo Violin and Haberdashery Soul remained strictly that, with only the most minimal embellishments. Other songs, we fleshed out with larger arrangements, like Heat – which is akin to ‘70s Philly Soul – or Ms. Skittish, which I think has a bit of a T. Rex feel to it. Then, there are other departures; like the track #violetmelvina, which began with a Johnny Marr-like guitar progression – but I ended up liking the lushness of the chords so much I wanted to move it over to piano and see what that sounded like. In the end, the entire track is merely piano and one solo vocal. It’s the first time I’ve tried something like that and I was really pleased with the result.”

When a quixotic rock-n-roll guitar player lays his tender fingers on some woozy loops and seasick beats, this accidental brainchild gets conjured. Two parts sheer exuberance, one part pure evil.

J.J. Benson is a Minneapolis guitar player and singer-songwriter whose material has been compared to everything from Ryan Adams to Todd Rundgren, Bob

When a quixotic rock-n-roll guitar player lays his tender fingers on some woozy loops and seasick beats, this accidental brainchild gets conjured. Two parts sheer exuberance, one part pure evil.

J.J. Benson is a Minneapolis guitar player and singer-songwriter whose material has been compared to everything from Ryan Adams to Todd Rundgren, Bob Dylan to Francis Dunnery. He's heavily influenced by Brit Invasion, Glam and Power Pop. Benson has also played sideman (guitar/bass) to dozens of luminaries in the Twin Cities area.

Vairagya is his first venture into 100% electronic music. "I started out playing with loops just to see where it would take me," said Benson. "I found those loops were like planting little seeds. Ideas would spring from them; I'd return the next day and work a little more -- suddenly I'd have these fully-fleshed songs. Soon thereafter, an entire album's worth. It was really joyful to see how things developed from almost nothing into something relatively complex, just by virtue of continuing to 'show up' and see where the process took me."

Benson cites having very little experience with, or exposure to, electronic music. “It’s not something I’ve ever really paid much attention to, so it’s tough to offer reference points for these songs. Loops are repetitive by nature, and though I understand the trance-like appeal, it’s something I tend to get bored with rather quickly. I found myself manipulating a lot of things to create progressions, changes, melodies and arrangements more akin to pop-rock songwriting, but in the instrumental-only vein.”

“Personally, I hear traces of certain influences from my childhood – anything from Depeche Mode to Peter Gabriel to Yello. The last track (Wild Turkey) almost reminds me of something by The Band.” All the songs are heavily layered and stray from any semblance of minimalism. “I read somewhere once how (songwriter) Dan Wilson once said the ear can’t pick up on more than 2 or 3 melodic figures in a song and that anything else would confuse a listener. I thought to myself, well what about symphonies? There’s all sorts of stuff going on there; point, counterpoint galore. The appeal of that, I think, is it allows one to get a bit ‘lost’ in an oceanic feeling of sorts. That’s the feeling a lot of these songs evoke for me. Not having much background with this medium really allowed me to embrace a ‘beginner’s mind’ mentality and construct whatever I wanted from the ground up; allow the muse to take me wherever it took me. It was tremendously fun and liberating to just throw whatever at the wall and see what stuck.”