Ben Gallaher
For rising country musician Ben Gallaher, there was no backup plan.
“It’s been a lifelong journey,” the 31-year-old said, reflecting on how his career has worked out so far. “It’s just all I’ve ever wanted to do, and it’s just been a huge blessing.”
The Camp Hill native, who’s been living in Nashville since 2011, started playing guitar at the age of 6 and never looked back.
“I knew this was what I was going to do,” he said. “I look at it as a God thing. I got blessed from a young age to know exactly what I was supposed to do.”
And listening to his debut full-length album, “Country in the House,” (released this past April via Stone Country Records), one can definitely hear his passion for playing guitar, which he said is “mostly self-taught.” He shines on tracks such as “Lovin’ You Gets in the Way,” with multiple chords whispering hints of ‘80s rock influences.
Gallaher, who also writes most of his own songs, said he didn’t really get into rock until he was in high school.
“[I] grew up on ’90s country music,” he said. “It wasn’t strictly really one artist or band. It was a combination of everything: Brooks and Dunn, early Tim McGraw records, Tracy Lawrence… and then early 2000s country, so Keith Urban growing up was an influence for me. Vince Gill, too—he’s just such an incredible guitar player.”
Gallaher’s creativity is apparent in his work. Listeners can tell he spends a lot of time writing songs inspired by all kinds of experiences. His song “Roots Grow Down,” inspired by his relationship with his wife Monica, is a pure love ballad, but “there’s some heartbreak songs on there, which is the furthest thing from my life right now.”
“My hope is that listeners feel something and connect with them when they hear it, through a lyric or guitar solo,” he said. “That’s the cool part about music, the connection it can have no matter where you’re at in life.”
Gallaher also shared his challenges with making “Country in the House” from an editing standpoint, saying that one of the hardest parts was trimming down the tracklist to just 15 songs, “because you get so attached to them.” One of his favorites from the album, which he loves performing live, is his hit song, “Still A Few Cowboys Left.”
“It’s one of the best responding songs—people are singing it all over the place,” he said. “We got a chance to film the music video at the Four Sixes Ranch [a setting on the show ‘Yellowstone’], so that was a really cool experience that got people excited.”
Same Cloth
Gallaher said that his album contains just two songs that he didn’t write.
He has a very hands-on process in every aspect of his music, working frequently with his longtime friend and collaborator, songwriter Carlton Anderson.
“We’ve written tons [together],” Anderson said. “On his record that he’s put out, we wrote ‘Country Boy’ and we wrote ‘Quote the Bible’, and then we’ve got a ton more” that are still unreleased.
Both songs speak to where both men come from.
“That’s one of the cool things we connect on, with me coming from Texas, and him coming from PA,” Anderson said. “When we met in Nashville, it was kind of a seamless friendship. We were cut from the same cloth, you know?”
Gallaher echoed similar sentiments when speaking about his view of the genre and music making, too.
“People have said, ‘You’re from Pennsylvania, you sing country?’” he laughed. “Country isn’t about location or where you live. It’s how you live, standing up for each other, the American spirit, having each other’s backs and getting up again.”
Anderson, who’s now based in his hometown of Boerne, Texas, is a songwriter who connected with Gallaher when they both were starting to get their footing in Nashville in the early 2010s, after Anderson found Gallaher performing through a YouTube video.
“He is just a phenomenal guitar player—a one-in-a-generational talent on the guitar, just the real deal. He was playing at Tootsie’s or some bar in Nashville and I was like, ‘Damn, this guy is amazing, that’s exactly what I want to be doing,’” Anderson said. “I hit him up to see if he was looking to join a band, and he said he was doing his own thing. So, once I moved to Nashville, we reconnected there and kind of just rolled from there.”
Before Gallaher moved to Nashville to pursue music, he was often playing around central Pennsylvania to get experience at open mic nights.
“I heard somewhere from a young age, start a fan base in your hometown because if they don’t like you there, they won’t like you anywhere,” Gallaher said. “So, I started building a fan base here with my acoustic stuff.”
Within a few months of moving to Nashville in 2011, he was packing places every time he would come home to play in PA.
“All those fans were there from the beginning and I got to connect with them—that’s the coolest part,” Gallaher said. “There’s something really special about playing in central PA. There’s a different kind of energy that I love.”
For more information on Ben Gallaher, visit www.bengallaher.com and his social media sites. He’s slated to perform locally on Oct. 8 at the I-105 FallFest Country Music Festival, Overlook Community Campus, 605 Granite Run Dr., Lancaster (Manheim Township). For more information, visit www.wiov.com/fallfest.
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