The Family Tree: The Leaves Radical Face

• 1Secrets (Cellar Door)04:25
• 2Rivers in the Dust05:45
• 3Everything Costs03:41
• 4Midnight03:09
• 5The Ship in Port03:43
• 6Photograph02:24
• 7Third Family Portrait03:44
• 8The Road to Nowhere04:46
• 9Old Gemini04:15
• 10Bad Blood04:50
• Total Runtime40:42

Info for The Family Tree: The Leaves

Ben Cooper, aka Radical Face, returns with the latest, and last, incarnation of his saga, The Family Tree: The Leaves.

More than 10 years ago, in a shed behind his mother's house, Ben Cooper AKA Radical Face, started an unprecedented musical journey. The story of a fictitious, and sometimes otherworldly 19th century family is brought to life in a three-part album series called 'The Family Tree.' Certain instrumentations and melodies are used to represent various "family members" and each album was recorded using only the instrumentation available during the era represented.

With the release of 'The Family Tree: The Leaves,' the Trilogy that's been 10 years in the making will finally come to a close. This final installment is the most personal of all the Family Tree albums for Radical Face as he incorporated some personal stories into the fictitious ones. The production is a progression from the first two albums in that it uses more modern instruments and melody lines are morphed from the first album through the second and into the third as they follow the family lineage.

The first two albums in the trilogy, 'The Family Tree: The Roots' (released 2011) and 'The Family Tree: The Branches' (released 2013) debuted at #20 and #10 on the Billboard Heatseekers Chart, respectively.

Ben Cooper
is a teller of stories, as seen with the fanciful album trilogy he launched in 2011, The Family Tree: The Roots, a chronicle revolving around a fictitious 19th-century family (the Northcotes) whose protagonists, unwittingly or not, chart a course for future generations. The second installment of the series, The Family Tree: The Branches, was released in 2013. The project embodies Radical Face’s fascination with big story arcs, history and genealogy — the characters in his sometimes-dark tales are drawn from research, personal experience and his own imagination.

Cooper’s own story could be the stuff of legend itself. As a teenager in Jacksonville, Fla., he had his heart set on being a professional skateboarder, but a serious back injury scotched that. He had played in rock bands but largely disdained band politics, so, inspired by books such as “East of Eden,” “One Hundred Years of Solitude” and the works of authors such as Cormac McCarthy, he embarked on writing a novel. He lost his entire manuscript in a computer crash. “So I decided to try it in record form,” he says. Radical Face’s penchant for otherworldly narratives was revealed on his 2007 release Ghost, a concept album based on the notion that houses retain memories of what transpired inside them. The song “Welcome Home” from Ghost, has garnered over 22 million YouTube views, mostly in part to a worldwide Nikon commercial (ex North America). Further television support has come from shows like Private Practice, Skins, Eddie Izzard, Weeds, as well as his late night national TV debut on Last Call With Carson Daly.

This album contains no booklet.