It’s hard not to feel that we’re all on a sinking ship.
Between climate change, endless wars, rising poverty, social disparity and the increasing prevalence and acceptance of authoritarianism, it seems many of us are doomed to get washed up in the metaphorical flood.
However, with that pessimism comes a brief glimpse of positivity. How do we make meaning outside of a corrupt system? When the world turns to ash, what will we look back on and cherish?
It won’t be the number we see in our bank accounts. It will be the connections we made with other people. This is the central theme of Ben Caplan’s latest album, The Flood—you can still find love when all seems lost.
The Halifax-based singer-songwriter has astounded audiences with his previous works, including 2011’s in the time of the great remembering and 2015’s Birds with Broken Wings. He’s never shied away from the political, and he’s always retained a certain thoughtfulness to his lyrics and approach.
However, as Caplan admits, the COVID-19 pandemic put a halt on his creative process.
“I had sort of been in a bit of a COVID miasma, you know,” says Caplan in an interview with The Coast. “Sort of like, getting by and figuring out the shit. I didn’t really have the juju flowing, if you know what I mean.”
Since the beginning of the pandemic, Caplan had only been doing solo shows. COVID forced him to cancel his world tour, so he had no choice but to strip back down. This was until Caplan had been invited to perform at a festival in Poland. They wanted a 90-minute show with a band behind him, and Caplan had a brilliant idea for what he wanted to do.
“I decided that I was going to, as a point of principle, perform 90 minutes of brand new music, and I wasn’t going to play any songs from my previous catalogue,” says Caplan.
Now the ball was rolling again. Caplan had to pencil in writing sessions with collaborators, hire band members, schedule workshops, and pull off this project in time for the music festival.
He did it. Then, he sought to produce it as his next album.
“I sort of knew before the festival, the ultimate goal was to create an album out of the materials, and I wanted to make, sort of like, one long concept album,” says Caplan.
Resources didn’t line up that way for Caplan, so he decided to choose songs that fit together from the bunch and produce one album now, and another album later. That’s the genesis of The Flood.
In true Caplan fashion, the first track kicks off with sinister piano chords as he reflects on one of the album’s central themes: the world is on the brink of destruction, and we know who’s at fault. He does this by twisting around an adage of the capitalist class, “a rising tide lifts all boats.” Caplan fights against this idea by saying, “there’s some of us who can’t float/ Some of us are working in the mud.”
“I’m talking about trickle-down economics,” Caplan explains. “I’m thinking about the fallacy, what’s good for the billionaire class is good for everybody. I think we, as a society, are kind of beginning to reach a sense of that. I feel like I’m not saying anything that’s radical or new.
“I’m thinking about how the structural inequality is built into the system, and it’s, you know, it’s tough to pull yourself up by the bootstraps when you don’t have any boots.”
Caplan wanted to address the anxieties of our times while still being a shred of optimism about the topic. The collapse we are witnessing is frightening, but the rhythm of Caplan’s music insists, you can still dance.
That’s not all you can do, either. In the second track, Caplan depicts a scene in a dream of a joyous wedding, and while the vows disintegrate upon waking, it’s revealing as to what’s left within disaster. His storytelling prowess continues on the third track, “Candy and Balloons” where a fun carnival turns into a tragedy for a mother who the listener must assume loses her child in the confusion. Caplan is consistently balancing joy with anxiety, and it leads to The Flood being as fun a listen as it is introspective.
The fourth track, “The Main Thing” is nearly five minutes of instrumentation, once again balancing joy and anxiety with resolute piano chords that shift towards a darker tone as Caplan’s vocals, though brief, share an interpolated version of a teaching from Hassidic Rabbi Nachman of Breslov, who wrote, “And know, a person needs to make his passage on a very, very narrow bridge, and the rule and the essence is to not be afraid at all.” Caplan says in the song that this teaching applies not just to the individual, but to the whole world.
“In any moment, a plane could fall out of the sky and crash into my house, or I could get hit by a bus, or I could get a cancer diagnosis,” says Caplan. “Many things could go wrong all of the time. The whole world is a very narrow bridge. Not just this moment, we’re not special. We’re not in a moment in history which we are uniquely in danger. There are other moments and other people in other times, and on this planet in this time, who are in much worse circumstances.
“I thought it was an important meditation to think about in context of doom and gloom, that all we can do is take one step at a time, and then we have to try and keep our heads up.”
The tracks “Lost & Found”, a spoken word poem reflecting on our interpretation of our circumstances, and “Lost”, a ballad about finding solace in those circumstances when in love, are connected not just by title, but musically and thematically. On “Lost & Found” Caplan inverts the words in his poem between verses, saying that the direction we take on our journey isn’t necessarily ours to decide, only for “Lost” to show that focusing on that direction is futile—rather, living in the moment, allowing yourself to be overwhelmed by something like a new relationship, is what can shed anxiety and create joy.
This theme of shedding existential dread and finding joy comes to a conclusion of sorts on the final track, “The Oracle”. Like the opening track, it’s a danceable tune with a nihilistic chorus that twists itself to being more of a carpe diem statement—everything will turn to dust, so why worry?
“The chorus comes from a beautiful piece of advice that my wife gave to me, reminding me that, you know, why worry? You know, it’s like, everything falls apart,” says Caplan. “I have a bit in my live show sometimes where I talk about how, you know, at some point in time, the earth will be swallowed by the sun and we’ll all, you know, any evidence of our various vain little human cultures will be erased. So, you know, don’t stress that too much. Don’t worry about it. It’s probably not a big deal.
“The idea of that song is really about, like, staring into the depths of nihilism and saying that love is real… the things we do in the face of nihilism, in the face of impossible odds, is to love the people around you, to try and be good to the people around you and to surrender to the beauty and to the power of what love is and what it means to be in relation to another person.”
While Ben is working on his next album—consisting of the other half of the songs from his performance in Poland—he’ll also be doing a short tour across Nova Scotia in support of The Flood. A more substantive, Canada-wide tour will be coming in the late fall. Tickets for both can be found on his website.
This article appears in Jun 1-30, 2025.