Raised in a family of Sunday-morning gospel vocalists, Pittsburgh-raised rapper Benji. was always known as the non-singer of the pack. Much to their surprise — and his own — his latest EP, Love Gun 2, features more of his singing voice than ever before.
“It was almost a known thing, like, ‘Oh, Ian is not a singer,’” Benji., whose real name is Ian Benjamin Welsh, tells Pittsburgh City Paper. “‘He's not the singer in the family, which is OK, because he's a great musician, but he's not going to be a singer.’ So it kind of caught everybody by surprise.”
On Love Gun 2, Benji.’s soulful voice bridges confessional rap lyrics with light, summery melodies. On “Radio,” the album’s lead single, he sings of wooing someone from outside their window, spinning this tried-and-true love story with old-school sultry passion.
A follow-up to last year’s Love Gun, Benji. wanted Love Gun 2 to explore the flip side of its predecessor’s lovestruck themes, evident in his anguished lyrics about an unhealthy relationship on “Keep Coming Back.”
“I felt duty-bound to present both sides, because so long as you love someone, that’s what’s going to happen,” Benji. says. “It either starts beautiful and gets ugly and returns to beautiful, or starts ugly, gets beautiful, and returns to ugly.”
It’d be easy to place Love Gun 2 in the same R&B-adjacent category as its counterpart, but songs such as “Message” and “Better” reveal Benji. to be equally interested in a kind of surfside alternative rock, packaged in polished rap production.
It’s a bold brew of sounds, with songs like “Radio” — the album’s most straightforward R&B track — leading into the Foo Fighters-influenced “Keep Coming Back.” Benji. traces the album’s range of genres to growing up in Homewood as the youngest in a family of musicians and singers.
“We used to have this gigantic CD booklet,” Benji. says. “Pages, pages, and pages full of CDs from every genre — jazz, you know, to R&B to gospel to funk to soul. Everything you could probably think of.”
When asked about the artists from those CDs that stuck with him, Benji. name drops a laundry list of funk and soul legends, from Sly and the Family Stone to Luther Vandross, along with some unexpected rock bands such as Green Day and Kiss, the latter of which sparked his interest in bass guitar.
“[Gene Simmons] had an Axe bass, and I was like, ‘That looks really cool. I want a bass guitar,’” he says, “and then I got one and haven’t put it down since.”
It wasn’t until Benji. started college at Duquesne University that hip-hop entered his life. Taken by the production of artists such as Lupe Fiasco and Kid Cudi, Benji. started trying his hand at making his own beats, academics be damned.
“In between classes — and when I skipped classes — I would just stay in the cafeteria … I would sit there and learn how to make beats on YouTube, and I just fell in love with it,” Benji. recalls.
With the help of his older brother John, who would go on to produce music under the name Christo for rapper JID as well as on Love Gun 2, Benji. continued honing his skills. After college, he officially decided to pursue a music career, releasing his ambitious first album, Smile, You’re Alive!, in 2018.
Benji.’s career took a major step up when, in March 2020, his brother invited him to Atlanta to work with Spillage Village, a rap collective that includes JID and EarthGang members Olu and WowGr8. When the pandemic hit a few days into the trip, the visit turned into an extended stay. The result? Benji. became a major contributor to Spillage Village’s quarantine-fueled album, Spilligion, and an official member of the group.
“I wasn’t going down there thinking, ‘I’m going to join Spillage Village.’ They were already a thing for years,” Benji. says. “I was just hoping to get some production credits or something, maybe a feature here and there. And then after we had pretty much wrapped up the project, I remember seeing a tweet saying ‘Benji. is the newest member of Spillage Village.’”
Up until that point Benji. had still been living in Pittsburgh, but the Spillage Village news was the kick he needed to move out, he says.
“Pittsburgh was all I knew,” Benji. says. “It's one of those leaps of faith that you take in this kind of journey. And at that point, I just felt like it was time, but also necessary if I do want to make it.”
Since then, he’s stayed busy. More collaborations with Spillage Village, re-releases of his first album, even providing an earworm of a chorus on the EarthGang hit “Bobby Boucher.” Now based out of Los Angeles, Benji. said he’s felt his priorities mature as his career grows — as long as his music continues to resonate, he’s happy.
“That means the world to me, because now, for me, music is like, as long as it's there, it'll find somebody,” Benji. says. “And that's what's most important to me.”
