Raised in Brooklyn, Ben de la Cour was playing New York City dive bars with his brother a full decade before he could legally drink. A high-school dropout and former amateur boxer, he received his education by listening to his parent’s record collection – full of everything from Bob Dylan and The Everly Brothers to Black Sabbath and Lynyrd Skynyrd. At the tender age of nineteen he spent a year in Havana training with members of the Cuban national boxing team before moving to London with his brother to revive their doom metal band, Dead Man’s Root. They lived in a van and toured around Europe until 2008 when de la Cour returned to the states with a head full of softer, bruised, but no less intense acoustic songs later described by No Depression as “brimming with urgent authenticity”.