The ballad of Benjamin Scheuer

We are sitting in the Crazy Coqs, an intimate cabaret lounge below street level at London’s Piccadilly Circus, where my friend has brought me to hear New York-born musician and songwriter, Benjamin Scheuer. He’s surrounded on the small stage by his five guitars, all tuned for the songs he’ll be performing in his set.  As the lights dim, my friend whispers, “I cried when I first listened to his music.” Sure, I think, but that won’t happen to me. 

Three songs in and my eyes are streaming.

Scheuer, 42, is singing many of the tracks from his autobiographical show, The Lion. The title song speaks of the sudden death of his father when he was only 13, and his own diagnosis of advanced cancer at 28. But this is not maudlin storytelling. Scheuer’s music is life-affirming and uplifting. So there are tears, but in a good way. 

The Lion opened in New York in 2014 and won an Off-West End Award for Best New Musical, with Scheuer also winning an award for his solo performance. He’s toured the show around the US, making over 500 appearances. 

Much of Scheuer’s appeal is the raw, unvarnished sentiment of his lyrics, a quality he attributes to advice he received at a workshop for emerging songwriters. “If you want to write a good song, write what you don’t want other people to know about you,” one of the teachers, country music singer/songwriter Lari White, told him. “And if you want to write a great song, write what you don’t want to know about yourself."

“I realised that I wanted people to like, admire and respect me, which is a bad place to start from when you are making art. I realised that, instead, having a deep need to tell the truth is perhaps a better place to begin,” says Scheuer.

“That prompt forced me to write things that made me feel like I was showing myself as uncool; things that, if I were to say them out loud, people wouldn’t trust me, or like me or find me attractive or interesting. Initially, it felt absolutely terrifying. But it’s become a practice so it’s gotten less scary.” 

Of course, exposing his innermost self means that those close to Scheuer may also find themselves laid bare to public scrutiny.

“My wife Jemima doesn’t love being written about. She’s a private person. It’s a big point of contention in our relationship. But I suppose in any good relationship, we navigate different points of view and different interests. I’m grateful that she supports my work as a whole, even if she doesn’t especially want to be sung about.” 

Scheuer met Jemima, a children’s illustrator, at an animation awards ceremony in London. He lives there now, and yes, he also wrote a song about that initial encounter.

“I first fell in love with Jemima when I fell in love with her illustrations. She can tell a story in a single image; she creates a character and the whole world inhabited by that character in one image. We’ve made two children’s books together. Our second, Hundred Feet Tall, is about a bunny rabbit called Bekko who finds a seed and grows it into a tree”, says Scheuer. He’s also adapted the book into a piece of musical theatre which he’s developing with The Old Vic in London.

Scheuer penned a less innocent song about trees in the aftermath of the 2022 Tree of Life Synagogue shooting. “Geoff Kraly, who’s produced lots of my recordings, sent me an article about Dr Jeffrey Cohen, the president of Allegheny General Hospital in Pittsburgh.

The day after the shooting, Dr Cohen, a member of the Tree of Life, went to check on a patient, Robert Bowers, the shooter who’d killed 11 people and who had been shot by police officers. Later, when Cohen was asked how he could possibly help Bowers, he said something along the lines of, “my job is to help sick people. This person is very sick”.

“I was moved by this and the idea that in order to heal the whole, we must begin to heal all parts.” The song uses the synagogue’s name and that of the shooter as a metaphor for a literal tree and the 'bowers', or shady place beneath it, with the lyric “we must heal the bowers in order to heal the tree”.

Scheuer’s songs are perhaps most affecting when he writes in the first person, even when the story he relates, as with the Tree of Life, is not his own. Another example is I Am Samantha, a song he wrote after a chance comment made in his local Greenwich Village coffee shop in New York.

The Foo Fighters’ song Sean was playing and one of the baristas, a trans woman called Samantha, complained that her coworker Sean had a song but who was going to write one with her name? Scheuer piped up. “I could try and write one if you like.” The result is a stirring anthem for transgender people which has been made into a music video, with a trans director and an all-trans cast.

a trans director and an all-trans cast. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tQWwpzck8Tk

While Scheuer is a powerful balladeer, he is also drawn to the creation of full musicals.

“My father took me to see the 1991 revival of Guys and Dolls on Broadway. I thought the show was the most extraordinary thing I’d ever seen with the best songs I’ve ever heard. Frank Loesser, who wrote the songs, is one of my heroes. A songwriter can write a good song by accident. But no one writes a good show by accident. That takes hard work.”

He’s currently putting in that “hard work” writing music and lyrics for a musical called Treasure about Peter Roget and his eponymous Thesaurus.

The inspiration came when he was teaching a songwriting class at UCLA and “I was waving my copy of Roget’s and saying how wonderful it was. One of the students asked, 'who is Roget?’”

Realising he had no idea, Scheuer read a couple of biographies. He discovered that Roget was a doctor who had gone to Edinburgh Medical School with Charles Darwin. They were both friends and rivals who loved the same woman, poet Mary Hobson. Roget saw the compulsive word lists he wrote as the garbage of his mind and was ashamed of them.

“I like to have at least two things going at once so that I can procrastinate one thing with the other. And if one falls to pieces that afternoon, I can immediately go and work on the second thing that’s still going.”

A decade after its launch, The Lion continues to engage audiences around the world. The show focussed on the significant role in his life of Scheuer’s father who taught him to play music. Now that he is a father of two himself, he is working on his follow-up show, A Mountain for Elodie, named after his daughter.

“Since I’ve become a father, my relationship with my own father has changed. That’s still true even though my father died when I was 13 years old. He remains a presence in my life and I still speak to him, often through song.” One of those songs, written for this new show, is called You’ve got a Grand Daughter Now. 

Though there’s a beautiful recording of it on his website, Scheuer says he hasn’t entirely cracked it yet. “There’s more rewriting to do. I don’t yet know what I want to say to my dad about being a dad. I suppose I’ll figure it out by writing the song.”