Raconteurs' Brendan Benson Launching Record Label

Brendan Benson performs with the Raconteurs during the Voodoo Experience Music Festival in New Orleans.

Erika Goldring/Getty Images

Brendan Benson, the power-pop songwriter who co-founded the Raconteurs with Jack White, is set to launch his own record label in April with his own next solo album. The Nashville-based company, Readymade, will release Benson's What Kind of World, his fifth solo album, as well as an album by Young Hines, the first artist signed to the label. 

Benson first used the name Readymade several years ago when he self-released his early demos, Well Fed Boy. The label will operate on an innovative model, working with various music-industry partners on commissions based on sales and licensing to keep up-front costs low and provide added incentive. 

Benson released his fourth solo album, My Old, Familiar Friend, in 2009. The Raconteurs released their second album, Consolers of the Lonely, in 2008. 

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Song Stories

“Piano Man”

Billy Joel | 1973

Billy Joel’s first hit, “Piano Man,” was – ironically – an autobiographical lament about how his first album wasn’t a hit. When Cold Spring Harbor didn’t take off, Joel briefly became a lounge pianist in Los Angeles, and this song, about that experience, expressed his frustrations and fears at the time: “And they sit at the bar and put bread in my jar/And say, ‘Man, what are you doing here?’” “It was all right,” Joel said later, about the gig. “I got free drinks and union scale, which was the first steady money I’d made in a long time.”

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