Yahoo Lifestyle Benson Boone’s Dream Team on the ‘Supernatural’ Making of ‘Beautiful Things’: ‘It Became a Mountain We Felt We Could Climb’
Producer-songwriter Evan Blair remembers the serendipitous moment a distorted guitar pedal abruptly sounded off during his first studio session with Benson Boone. It was an accident, but at Boone’s request, he didn’t adjust the setting, and Boone continued humming what would eventually become “Beautiful Things.”
“That changed everything,” says Blair, one of Boone’s main producers on his debut LP, “Fireworks and Rollerblades.” “It set a precedent for us as collaborators: Let’s do something that might not make sense at first, and we might not know where or how it’ll end, but we’ll get there.”
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After being signed to Warner, Boone and Blair met with songwriter Jackson LaFrantz Larsen at the recommendation of executive vice president of A&R Jeff Sosnow. “At the very beginning, we were setting Benson up with a range of collaborators,” says Jon Chen, Warner Chappell Music’s VP of A&R. “It was equally important for us to prioritize listening to him; he had an incredible sense of awareness and knew exactly what suited him.”
That’s a fitting description for Boone. After all, the 22-year-old wrote bits and pieces of “Beautiful Things” over two nights when he couldn’t sleep. “They started as separate ideas in different keys in my head. I didn’t even consider putting the two together,” he says, “until the next day, when I met with [Blair and LaFrantz Larsen].”
Boone and his collaborators wrote at least 20 versions of the song but it was LaFrantz Larsen who initiated bridging the separate versions as one. “This was one of the times where I just blurted out a thought before second guessing it,” he says LaFrantz Larsen. “I’ve learned to try to do that more often. I really think a lot of magic comes from just saying your ideas before you can talk yourself out of them or think to hard about them.”
Adds Blair, “In almost any other session with any other artist, I would have stopped it at ‘We’ve got two songs here.’ I didn’t, because there’s something about Benson that’s so supernatural that the song became a mountain we felt we could climb.”
Released in January, “Beautiful Things” hit a No. 2 peak on the Billboard Hot 100 in March and is at No. 9 on the latest chart. It became his third and biggest hit, along with “Ghost Town” in March 2022 and “In the Stars” in September 2023.
Songwriters: Benson Boone, Evan Blair, Jack LaFrantz Larsen
Producer: Evan Blair
Label: Warner Records
Hitmakers:
Evan Blair, producer and songwriter / Jackson LaFrantz Larsen, songwriter
Jeff Sosnow, Warner EVP of A&R
Jeff Burns, manager
Jon Chen, Warner Chappell Music
Thomas Krottinger, Sony Music Publishing
TJ Landig, Warner SVP Marketing Operations and Strategy
Publishers: Sony Music Publishing, Warner Chappell Music/Saint Sounds
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