Dealin' with Ben Rogers

If you took half the raw talent in Vancouver's young roots scene and added it together, you'd probably still fall short of one Ben Rogers. You need to see him live to catch the dark, onstage charisma, but his spooked sounding baritone comes through loud and scary on the newly released Lost Stories: Volume 1, as does the gift for spinning his own private Americana on tracks like opener, "The Dealer."

Rogers also asks a lot of the listener when, in his most affected performance, he starts an album with the line, "I was born in Carolina, raised with a heavy hand..." Because, you know, he wasn't. We're left to decide whether or not we buy the range of Guthrie-to-Springsteen archetypes Rogers adopts across the record -- murderous cuckold in "The Cheatin' Kind"; a convict sent to Vietnam in "Jailbird Song"; gold panning killer in "The Devil's Crop (500 Miles)" -- or who he's speaking for besides his own fertile imagination.

But then we also have tracks like "Once a Wife, Twice a Widow," in which Lazarus and Ulysses somehow get folded into Rogers' own personal mythology, or "Kingdom Come," a gospel number that trails off – rather untraditionally -- into a cloud of ominous dissonance. I'm still trying to figure out what he's getting at with the lady who "rules with an iron tampon" in "Lay it Down," but it's in these quirks and outré moments that I feel like I'm hearing the real artist, and not a master impressionist.

To put it another way, Rogers has plunked himself inside a genre that values authenticity even more than a voice that stops you dead or songwriting chops that could open the door to a nice publishing deal. If Lost Stories is the last thing he ever did, it would be an enormous achievement, but I hope Ben Rogers continues to write from experiences closer to his own home -- as he does to powerful effect on "Cowboys and Indians." There are plenty more damaged souls and grim campfire tales right here in our backyard that could use his voice and sensitivity.