With The Rain Museum, out now on Equal Vision Records, Ben Jorgensen pens a new chapter in his life and puts it on the record with Armor For Sleep. His pen, his words, they paint pictures of disappointment and loss. Pulling vibes from nearly their whole career and restoring them, metaphorically, like fine art—there’s a refined clarity captured on this album.
The Rain Museum has its own vibe—It’s clearer; it’s crisper. It sounds like a starless night, a new moon in a forest, a still ocean before a hurricane, an electrical storm in the air. The Rain Museum—like an exhibition hall in your mind—conjures the vision of what Jorgensen is showing the listener about his life.
Each step is exploring sonic art. Each piece, each song, the work is poetry. Each note you hear, each word Jorgensen exclaims, dreams and drowns viewed through vivid imagination—a strong collection of work.
“It’s funny bringing up dreams and drowning—I guess I never thought of those two things specifically as repeating patterns, but thinking back, they obviously are. If I was just to look at both of them, yeah, I’ve always been interested in dreams. I think the subconscious mind is really interesting to me, and also a dream is kind of a metaphor of escape, you know, which is something I think that I like to touch on a lot, too. And drowning is probably a clumsy metaphor for failure or giving in. And that’s also something that I think we’ve touched on over the years.”
All the way back to the beginning, exploring Armor For Sleep, their first album, Dream to Make Believe, “Kind of Perfect.” The song goes, “I’ll live where you put me.” Jorgensen’s examples are historic ways of keeping record—in a VCR or on a cassette tape—Their impact is lasting.
The Rain Museum is an idea and an album that took years to table. It started on the heels of their second album, What To Do When You Are Dead, over 15 years ago and lived in the back of Jorgensen’s mind. In conservation and restoration, there’s a VHS copy of their original emo sound, and it’s updated in 4K on The Rain Museum. It took some time, some living life to get it out of storage.
“So what we shelved was we came out with our album, What To Do When You Are Dead, in like 2005, I believe, that was the album that our fans responded to the most. It was exciting for me as a writer because I felt like we did a concept album that was just more than a collection of songs. I really saw how cool it could be to kind of like tell a larger story. I was really pumped after that record, and I had the idea of making an album called The Rain Museum, which was based on a short story that I had written a couple years before that. My idea was to kind of right off What To Do When You Are Dead. It was gonna be like an even bigger concept album.”
The idea was big, and it was about to get simplified.
“I wanted a book to accompany the album, and I think there were a bunch of bands who were getting super into, like, the concept album at the time. I wanted to do that, and at the same time we, in hindsight, probably made the wrong decision to sign to a major label at that point. So I came to the major label, and I was like, ‘All right, I had the idea for the next album. It’s gonna be this huge concept album. I’m gonna write a book that’s gonna accompany it.’ And they were almost immediately like, ‘No, you guys are on a major label now; let’s do a simple Armor For Sleep record, like, keep it simple.’”
“We were young kids at the time; we just wanted to play ball, and we didn’t wanna let down the big adults in the room. So we listened to them, and we made an album that ultimately they weren’t happy with because we didn’t turn into My Chemical Romance overnight. Which it just happens on major labels, they want instantaneous success. And if that doesn’t happen, they lose interest. So we broke up a couple years after that, and I never got to make that album.”
With a 2020 refresh of What To Do When You Are Dead, Armor For Sleep were poised to hit the road on a 1- year anniversary tour when things in Jorgensen’s life left him alone and inside. Jorgensen continues:
“Flash forward to 2020 when the pandemic hit; I was in the right head space to write an album. And I was like, ‘You know what; I think I’ve always wanted to see this album come to life.’ I wanted to use that time when we were all on lockdown. I wanted to use that as my opportunity to bring this thing into reality.”
Tragedy is a catalyst and a motivator. Jorgensen changed his course, and The Rain Museum became a personal chapter in the Armor For Sleep story.
“The next part is, unfortunately for me, I didn’t know this at the time, but something really messed up in my life was about to hit me. My marriage of eight years blew up in my face and completely fell apart. So in the middle of this pandemic situation, I had no one to turn into. I couldn’t see any of my friends or family or anything ‘cuz everyone was, you know, stuck inside. All I had was this album. Originally, this album wasn’t really gonna be about me; it was gonna be about resurrecting this thing from the past, just to do it. It suddenly turned into, like, a really personal album about what I was going through.”
“I knew this when I was going into writing this album; I knew that it was going to be like memorializing what I was going through in this very dark chapter of my life. When I made that decision, I also knew that, like, this wasn’t gonna be an album where one song’s gonna be a happy song, and the next song is gonna be about some random thing. It’s all a lot about a dark chapter of my life. If somebody doesn’t want to listen to that, then they probably don’t wanna pick up this album.”
The album’s like any other museum,—Don’t like Andy Warhol; keep exploring. Jorgensen picks the last song, a song called, “Spinning Through Time” as the piece that most represents the whole work.
“I feel like musically, lyrically, I wanted to kind of summarize a lot of what was in the album. If I had to choose one above the others, I would just probably choose that song because it’s a culmination of everything that’s been leading up to it. I tried to say some things that I was saying earlier in a little bit more of a concise way.
“And I just, you know, I like that song. I think one of the cool things that Courtney Ballard did as a producer was, for instance, in a song like this, he heard the demo, and it’s a very simple song. The first two minutes of his song are just me and a keyboard, and he didn’t want to change it at all. He just let it stand on its own. And I appreciate that because I think other producers would’ve come in there and tried to make it a little bit more complex, but I think he heard that it; it’s kind of like a very simple, stark message.”
Jorgensen breaks down, “Rather Drown:”
“The metaphor for that song is, I’m standing on a beach, and the trees, everything, is on fire. The only place to go for safety is like just swimming out as far as possible. And the chorus of that song says, ‘I’d rather drown than watch it all burned down,’ I mean, I’m never wanting to head into, like, what specifically that means for me, but just in general, it’s just, you know, when you’re going through a traumatic breakup situation, whether it’s a breakup, whether it’s a personal loss, sometimes, like we can be really strong and be like, ‘You know what, tomorrow’s another day; I’m gonna wake up. And even though this sucks, I’m gonna go for it.’
“But honestly, for me, I went through this breakup, there were some mornings when I didn’t wanna wake up, when I didn’t want to—I couldn’t put on that that smile; I couldn’t, you know, find it in me to persevere. I know it’s like, everyone wants to be like positive. And, and obviously I came out the other side in one piece. But you know, sometimes we don’t all feel like we’re ready to like fight. And so this song is just about that feeling of, like, not even wanting to try anymore, just wanting to, like, shut it all out and just—It’s about giving up really.”
He sums up the process of creating this record.
“This one was a little bit different because I live in LA, and they’re all on the East Coast. This record was recorded in the heart of quarantine, so it was just a little bit different. Everyone was doing Zoom, so we did more Zoom updates from the studio. I think those guys are so important to the band and to everything.”
The Rain Museum is a place in Jorgensen’s mind, it’s from his heart—It’s sonic. If it had a terrestrial home, that home might be New Jersey.
“That’s where I grew up. That’s where, as a band, we all went to shows in New Jersey and grew up. That’s how we all know each other. My family’s still out in New Jersey, so I’m still back there, like, once every couple months. So, I consider New Jersey our home base.”
Jorgensen is as reflective in conversation as he is in song as he looks back at Armor For Sleep:
“None of us are 16 anymore, you know? And I know that my favorite records I listened to when I was younger—They meant something to me ‘cuz I was younger and going through my own thing. I think it wouldn’t be fair to expect those people who What To Do When You Are Dead was their favorite album, for them to also latch onto this one in the same way because they’re in different places in their lives. I don’t expect that from anyone.”
In conclusion, The Rain Museum is a near-perfect emo record. It holds the emotions Jorgensen felt as he navigated his divorce. These thoughts and feelings are crisp, fresh and new—off his chest and into the air. It’s a bridge he’s crossed and an exhibit he’s curated. Jorgensen hopes his experience will hold meaning in someone else’s life, too. As a docent, he sums up this album,
“I think when I was younger, I would’ve, like, fought that a little bit and been like, ‘No, I wanna put something for everyone on this album.’ But I think, now, I was OK with knowing that like this was going to be basically a dark breakup album to reflect what I was going through, and I’m OK with that. Also I just I knew I wasn’t gonna be in this space forever, but I think that anyone who’s ever been through a traumatic experience, whether it’s a breakup or losing somebody or—There’s so many traumatic things that happen to us. Sometimes even those moments are like small chapters in our lives.
“I think sometimes they’re the most important, and sometimes those moments are when we reach out into the world and look for things that can speak to us. So in the back of my head, I think I really did do this album knowing that I was writing about this one very specific, dark time in my life, but hoping that if someone down the road in the future of humanity is going through their own hard time, and they happen to find this album, and it speaks to them, it can help someone or a couple people going through their own situations. Then, I’ve succeeded.”
Image courtesy of @thedecathect
