24 Hours in Mexico with Benjamin Booker

Even in a dark, bunker-like room where the only light is the last bit of late Tuesday afternoon sun peeking down a rickety staircase and through a thick cloud of smoke, the 27-year-old Booker stands out. Maybe it's his mustard yellow track jacket, or maybe it's that he has—and he would never admit this—an energy about him that draws people in. The bartender comes over and Booker orders himself a beer in Spanish with the ease of a seasoned local.

"You pick up a lot of the language while you lived here?" I ask, referring to the month last year Booker spent in Mexico City, clearing his head to write his sophomore album, Witness.

"Nah," he laughs, revealing a wide, toothy smile a dentist would proudly hang on an office poster. "I can basically only order a beer."

Booker has a wiry build and a perpetual glisten of sweat on his forehead, contrasting against the matte brown of his curly hair. In the rare moments that he's not rolling himself a cigarette, he's chewing on a tea tree toothpick in an attempt to wean himself off of them.

"The police don't care about that here?" I ask, pointing to the 50 pesos' worth of weed openly laid out on the bar in front of him. Seeing as how there was a guy in the dingy bathroom casually smoking crack as a busboy washed his hands, I feel like I already know the answer.

"I don't think so," Booker says as he flicks a lighter. "I hear some cops come to this bar to get high on their lunch breaks." He inhales and passes it around among two local friends who have come to catch up. One of them makes a joke about hoping Booker doesn't get too famous to hang out with them anymore, and he just laughs it off. Once he's good and stoned, he has an idea. "We should go to church."

As we walk across the street to a towering cathedral that offers some quiet respite from the bustling city, I barrage him with a series of questions about the country that inspired his second album. Booker used to be on the other side of the recorder—he studied journalism at the University of Florida before falling into a career as a musician—but he likes it better this way around

"So what's the word count on this article?" he asks, sounding daunted by the task of someone making sense of a career he's still trying to wrap his own brain around.

"Around 3,000 words," I tell him, even though I'm fairly certain I already answered that question on the drive down.

While writing for the local newspaper, The Alligator, in college, Booker conducted a series of what he describes as "awful interviews" with performers coming through town. One subject, though, gave him some unexpected perspective that would change the course of his life. In a phoner with writer Chuck Klosterman that was supposed to be limited to 15 minutes but ended up lasting over an hour, Klosterman offered some advice: The key to life, he said, is merging the third of the day spent working with the third of the day spent on personal projects.

"After that, I said, 'Okay, I'm just gonna work some coffee shop job and play the music that would make me happy,'" says Booker, who has held a near endless string of random jobs at record stores, gas stations, museums, 7-Eleven, Circuit City, Americorps. You name it, Booker's done it.

The swift serendipity that followed is a well-documented chapter of the Benjamin Booker story. After leaving Florida for New Orleans, where he played in town with a band a few nights a week, he got discovered almost instantly by ATO Records. They agreed to release his debut album, containing the first and only 12 songs he'd ever written, and Booker quit his job at a coffee shop the next day.

Three months before the album was even out, he found himself making his network television debut on The Late Show with David Letterman to perform "Violent Shiver," a thumping, raspy-voiced rock banger with a riff jammed into it that would make Chuck Berry smile. He'd soon go on to perform on Conan and Later with Jools Holland, and landed a tour opening for Jack White in the summer of 2014. Countless artists spend entire careers fighting to reach this level of success. Booker did it in just a few months.

Naturally, the press's interest was piqued by this charismatic 25-year-old whom the reigning king of guitar rock had deemed fit to share his stage. Major publications like The New York Times, Billboard, and Elle threw a spotlight on the wunderkind's overnight success story. NPR, an outlet to which Booker had been submitting his resume for entry-level jobs just two years prior, praised his songwriting and noted that his album left the listener "really wanting to hear where this guy's going next." The problem was, Booker's guess was as good as anyone's.

"I got to do everything I could've wanted to do when I was a kid dreaming about being in a band, checked off all the things on a list of what I wanted to do," he says. For Benjamin Booker, a man who crammed an entire career into a mere three years and now sits in a Mexican church among people asking God for answers, there's a single question hanging in front of him: Now what?

"And one octopus taco and one baja fish taco," he tells our waiter at an outdoor restaurant that overlooks a parking lot with the help of a friend translating. "Aaaand, oh, and I've got to try the marlin one, right? Yeah, one marlin taco."

Booker starts to get a flurry of text messages informing him that Katy Perry has just announced an album, also called Witness. "What can you do?" he shrugs. While he's distracted, I spot his passport sitting on the table. Naturally, I start peeking through it. There's almost no more room left in its pages, which are covered with stamps from around the world—Japan, Australia, Canada, Korea, France, and everywhere in between. I flip to one page and there's a very tired Booker staring back. His eyes are glazed over and his hair is wildly unkempt. I blurt out laughing at his typically warm visage turned cold at the mercy of the black-and-white customs mugshot. "Hey, look," he defends, "when you come back from two years of touring, let me know what you look like."

The last few years have been an exhaustive baptism by fire for Booker, as he was thrust onto big stages around the world and in front of TV cameras before he learned the basics of being a musician.

"I lost years of my life when we started touring—puking before shows. I didn't even know how to plug in my guitar amps. My drummer had to be like, 'Okay this cord goes here,'" he remembers. "But after that, it was like… I wonder what else I can do."

Afraid that his luck might run out, Booker kept taking opportunities that came up, learning on the fly until he eventually felt more comfortable in the skin of a musician. He also learned how to navigate the press, relying on his charisma and journalism chops to win them over. He got insanely good at fielding questions about Jack White and has his prepared responses down to the letter. Jack is a great guy. The tour was scary but a great learning experience. The White Stripes' Elephant was the first CD he ever bought in the eighth grade.

"I lie to journalists all the time," he admits. "The good thing with music journalists is that they don't fact-check anything. So you can pretty much say anything that you want." Booker, whose real name is Benjamin Evans, says he's been able to use this to separate his public persona from his private life and has kept a bit of a guard over the real him. But after two straight years of hard touring, he seems to have lost sight of who that even is.

Booker had gotten so accustomed to life as a touring musician that when he finally returned to New Orleans after two years on the road, it didn't feel familiar anymore. The people and places he knew had changed and moved on without him. The unfamiliarity was driven home for him one night while riding his bike to a party he was invited to by the author Michael Azerrad. He was shot at from a passing car in what he believes was an attempted robbery, and he zig-zagged through the back streets to escape. This came shortly after a friend in the area was robbed at gunpoint. After that, he decided it was time to move to LA, where he now resides in an apartment at the bottom of a hill in Echo Park with his girlfriend, an Australian documentary filmmaker.

"I had a lot of self-realizations. I wasn't happy the whole time we were touring. I didn't enjoy any of it," he says. "It's such a cliché, which is why I hate talking about it, but if you're not happy with yourself when you get to achieve your dreams, well, then having success has nothing to do with being happy."

Recognizing that he was "a songwriter with no songs," Booker packed a suitcase and a guitar and headed to Mexico City for a month to write his follow-up album, though he is fully aware of how worn the guy holes up for a month to find himself trope is.

"Bon Iver ruined it for everyone!" he laughs, referring to Justin Vernon's famous winter spent in a Wisconsin cabin that produced his 2007 hit debut, For Emma, Forever Ago. "I don't believe any of that story for a second. And Bob Dylan straight-up lied about it too!"

Booker puts down his octopus taco and takes his phone out to show me a map of where he stayed in Mexico City, on the border of Doctores and Juarez, a location whose mere name visibly horrifies his friends. But despite the neighborhood's notoriously high crime rate, Booker says he found it mostly friendly and welcoming, even as a rising presidential candidate back home smeared Mexicans as criminals and rapists.

Booker's month spent south of the border brought him something he didn't know he needed: Solitude. "It was just being alone for so long," he says. "That was the longest I've ever spent in silence." Most days, he wandered through museums or sat in old cathedrals to think. He took long walks around the apartment he rented from an artist couple or sat in parks and read the authors a 20-something reads when trying to find themselves, namely Jean-Paul Sartre and Don DeLillo. While reading the latter's White Noise on the plane there, a quote jumped out at him:

"What we are reluctant to touch often seems the very fabric of our salvation."

Booker read the line over and over. He took out a piece of paper, wrote it down, and started a bulletpoint list of his personal faults and things he wanted to fix about himself, things he had been reluctant to touch. This was the outline for the ten songs that would become Witness.

"Everyone has their problems to work through, but if you're looking for some sort of peace and happiness in life, you have to confront those problems," he says. "You have to go down that dark route to come out on the other side."

And so he did. What emerged was deeper and more introspective than the mostly straightforward, post-college party rock songs about women that had gotten him discovered in the first place. The title track, which features powerful backing vocals from the legendary Mavis Staples, sees Booker grappling with whether he's been too passive in the fight against racial inequality as a black man in America. On album opener "Right on You," Booker criticizes himself for selfishly taking life for granted when death is always right around the corner. The album is littered with these sorts of reflections, where Booker plays his own psychiatrist.

This desire to confront his unexplored shortcomings seeps into the album's musicality as well. Booker deliberately and frequently changes up his style throughout songs in an attempt to avoid being pinned down to any one kind of sound. While there's a healthy lump of fast-paced punk influence from the Gainesville, Florida, scene that birthed him—bands like Against Me! and This Bike Is a Pipe Bomb—there's a staggeringly diverse assortment of sounds thrown in, from blues to gospel, that all blend seamlessly. Booker says he picked up a lot of ideas for beats from listening to A Tribe Called Quest and 60s soul records. His live show, which started as him playing solo with an acoustic guitar before becoming a ruckus three-piece band, has evolved with his sound, and now features violins, keyboards, and sometimes a backing choir.

Witness flexes fast growth for an artist whose career has moved fast. Maybe he didn't answer NPR's question of where he's going next, and maybe it's not for him to say. But in making it, he finally understood where he'd been, catching up to the person he'd become in a rise that moved quicker than he could process. He proved to himself that not only could he do more with his talents but that he wanted to, something he had taken for granted. And since he was gifted with a early start, he decided he'd better not squander it.

"I had to ask myself: Do I even want to be an entertainer? Do I want to be a song-and-dance man?" he says. "That's nice, and I enjoy doing this, but if the only thing I wrote about was Saturday nights out with girls, I'd feel like that would be such a waste of my life."

There's a beige, L-shaped leather couch around a TV in the living room, but the only DVD in the place is the Leonardo DiCaprio/Claire Danes version of Romeo + Juliet. We have to keep our voices down since the older woman next door keeps banging on the wall and telling us, I assume, to shut the fuck up. As the cans of Tecate pile up and words start to slur, our conversation about what he learned about himself while writing Witness in Mexico becomes more existential and abstract until we've hit the inevitable "What is life, even?" question, a surefire sign it's time to call it a night.

"I hope you got everything you needed for your article," Booker says. "What's the word count for it?"

"3,000 words," I say. "Same as the last time you asked."

"3,000, jeez," he says, shaking his head.

"Well," I pose, hoping to appeal to his past life as an aspiring journalist, "how would you write this story?" Immediately, I sense that I may have fed him too big of a question to chew on in the late hours after a case of Tecate. But for Benjamin Booker, a man who fate decided was better suited to be the subject than the interviewer, it's an easy one.

"Me?" he says, cracking one last smile before heading off to bed. "I wouldn't write this story."

Dan Ozzi is on Twitter.