Paul Bender - How to Forget (2022) Hi-Res

It wasn’t until Paul Bender had written a few songs as he began to work through a break-up that he realized he had the makings for an album. It wasn’t just any breakup either. It was the sort of life-altering gut punch you could never imagine happening until it does, the sort of heartbreak so completely consuming that doing anything at all feels like a triumph. And the songs continued to flow, to the point where Bender realized that he had nearly an album’s worth of material. With a planned trip to spend a month with his family in Tasmania, he seized the opportunity to load his car with instruments and recording gear as he embarked on the overnight ferry, continually writing and plotting on the boat and during the long ride from the ferry to his family home. And as soon as he got settled, he set up his gear in a stone walled wine cellar, and began the process of capturing these songs in his first collection of music not only playing every instrument, but also as lead vocalist.

For fans of Bender’s work as the bassist in Hiatus Kaiyote, or his playful, hysterical rap project, or his production work for artists like Laneous, The Putbacks, and Jaala, his solo work will come as a bit of a surprise. But when you weigh these projects together, the variety, stunning unique clarity, and unending creativity, this evolution for Bender is the next logical step. His new solo album, How To Forget, is filled with richly realized meditations on love and love destroyed, on picking up pieces and wondering what to leave behind. It shows a complexity that he’s hidden behind bombastic basslines and otherworldly one-liners in the past.

On “Sometimes I Wonder,” he lays it bare, his voice both sweet and cynical above a gently plucked guitar. It’s the sound of a smile twisted into pain, and eventually, forgiveness. There’s a bit of the Beatles at their most heartbroken, Lee Hazlewood deeply entwined in his cynicism.

It turns out Paul Bender always had an album’s worth of songs in him, he just needed an opportunity for them to exist. “‘Sometimes I Wonder’ sort of just happened. After sitting with a guitar for thirty minutes and writing words, it was finished,” he explains. He caught the bug, and before long, an album was in the works. “I was just like, ‘Oh shit, I really like that song I just wrote, I should do it again.’ Two or three weeks later, I had them all written, finishing the closing track of the album, “Manaema”, at home in Tasmania.” This closing track, rich with a choir of mournful cellos, is perhaps the album’s most romantic moment, and maybe even its most vulnerable.

Writing came easily, and the recording opened up a whole other level of excitement in the process. The album moves from feeling close and intimate to having the cavernous haze of a David Lynch dream, as the walls vibrate and echoes bounce off the ceiling like pinballs. “I had access to this space down at my family’s home, this crazy underground fucking manmade cave thing. It’s this epic tunnel built in a cliff face, and I recorded the entire album there. The space became as much a part of the sound as the songs were,” he explains. “And also, it felt appropriate to record such a heartbroken album deep beneath the earth’s surface, far from sunlight.”

The sound of the room is indeed a character throughout the record, like on “A Darkened Place,” where Bender’s trusty hollow body guitar interacts with the caverns in a miraculous way, with notes calling and responding beneath his delightfully passionate layers of vocals. “I’ll Be Searching” begins with the same picked guitar tone that resonates throughout the album, but transforms itself into a massive, epic chamber pop opus, showing off his ability to control tension at the record’s most grandiose and gothic peak. “Try to hide the poison that’s within,” he sings, though clearly he knows such a task is futile.

How To Forget is Paul Bender at his bravest and most vulnerable, but always willing to search for answers as he works through his pain and finds catharsis. “The ambiguity of whether the title How To Forget is a prescription of action or a lingering question is something I think about. The reality is that it is both, and simultaneously neither,” he explains. “I don’t think it’s ever possible to truly forget the most significant relationships in our lives, at least never completely.” He realizes this throughout the album, as he moves from questioning the past to learning how to accept it and grow with it. How To Forget is a meditation on relationships, yes, but it’s also about the self, a celebration of being halved and slowly finding a way to piece yourself together again.

“The ability to make this album, and the fact that some ethereal window opened to shine through me at that time is a gift that isn't available to everyone with a broken heart,” Bender explains when reflecting on the wrenching process of producing this record. “I’ll forever have a memento of how deeply I loved.” And, hopefully, a map—a reminder that pain is fleeting and in its wake something as beautiful, true, and raw as How To Forget can emerge.