Find Religion in the Guitars of Benjamin Booker's "Have You Seen My Son?"

Photo by Max Norton

The lost highways of the South have been a source of mystique in music for about a hundred years, but usually those highways of our imagination are the dirt road type or, at best, the two-lane type. To someone driving a certain swampy stretch of the South today, though, there's a far higher likelihood that they'll be cruising down I-10, and it's definitely a trip that Benjamin Booker, a Tampa native who briefly lived in New Orleans has made before. So it's a road trip from Florida to New Orleans that plays a role in the conflict of this song "Have You Seen My Son?", which takes a bluesy title and pulls it into the 21st century by turning it into a garage rock epic.

"Have You Seen My Son?" is like a layer cake of guitar shredding, incorporating Dinosaur Jr. quality riffs with an insistent, punk-like forward motion, and pained singing that splits the difference between Conor Oberst and Bruce Springsteen. After lacerating lyrics like "I said I'm trying to find some truth in this world/I know there's things that you wont understand" and "I said God must love everyone/Even the ones the church loves the least" the song comes to a standstill and finally erupts into a swollen, crystalline cacophony of guitars before another set of swampy riffs. There's an age-old struggle out there on those American highways, and this is what it sounds like in the modern world. America is a country tilting against its religious values constantly, and this is its own sort of religion.

Benjamin Booker has already had a pretty meteoric rise, getting tapped to open for Jack White and appearing on Letterman earlier this year. His self-titled debut album is out August 19 on ATO, and, if this is any indication, it's going to rip. Check out "Have You Seen My Son?" below: