Question Quick Fire: Bram Besoff
Formerly of the touring band Soup, drummer-businessman Bram Besoff was at one point playing more than 150 live shows a year. Although he’s no longer road-warrior musician, he’s still very much in the scene with his business Indiehitmaker, and he still finds time to play for the occasional Soup reunion.
Atlanta Jewish Times: What is your favorite thing about what you do?
Bram Besoff: I do it for the moment. To truly love what you do, you want a job or career that keeps providing you life experiences worth talking about when you’re 80. For me, that love is music and, more specifically, live music.
Now that I am no longer a touring musician, I have put that passion into my business [Indiehitmaker], keeping me “all-in” on the live show. We then make sure sales get reported to Soundscan and, when an artist sells enough, they get on the Billboard charts, proving their success to everyone, on their own terms – another favorite part of my job.
AJT: How did you discover the drums?
BB: This is a funny story considering the fact that I grew up in a kosher, Conservative home. In utero, I kicked and banged my whole way through “Jesus Christ Superstar” and have been playing ever since [laughs].
I started on card board boxes, moved up to a toy drum set and, after breaking that, got my first real kit (a CB 700 drum set) when I was in fifth grade.
AJT: If you were going to a desert island and could only bring 5 albums, which would you choose?
BB: This is a hard question. First, I would take Pink Floyd “Animals” with me so I could be certain to listen to David Gilmore’s guitar solo over and over again. For the rock-and-roller in me, I would need to have some DeLeo brothers on hand, but it wouldn’t be Stone Temple Pilots. One of my all-time favorite records is by the short-lived super group Army of Anyone; unfortunately, they only came out with one record.
I would definitely need a Jane’s Addiction CD with me, which hands-down would need to be “Ritual de lo Habitual.” And for those moments when Tom Hanks started talking to a ball, I would have to go for some Mars Volta and truly get lost for a moment with 2003’s “De‑Loused in the Comatorium.”
That fifth choice is really hard, I might have to decide between “Troubadour,” the third studio album by Somali-Canadian hip hop artist K’naan, and another A&M/Octone artist that never truly broke, As Fast As, whose debut release “Open Letter to the Damn” has one of my favorite tunes of all time, “This Is Real.”
Hopefully in this day and age, I would be shipwrecked with my iPod and solar battery charger.
Find Besoff on Facebook at “bramrocks” or follow him on Twitter (@bram_rocks) to find out when and where he’ll be playing as well as new artists to check out.
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