When he sings ruefully in "Mary Ann," one of the songs on his Bardic Records debut, Edible Darling, "The older I get, the more I realize/The best I can hope for his compromise," Ben Arthur is only half-serious. After all, the young veteran hasn't toiled at his craft for more than a decade to give in without a fight for his beliefs.
The singer-songwriter has been through a litany of near-misses after being heavily courted by several major record labels through the years.
For his Bardic Records bow (after two releases on his own Chicken Butter label), Arthur made sure he did things his way, with the help of engineer Mike Shipley (Aerosmith, India.Arie, Shania Twain, Def Leppard).
"I never doubted that playing music is what I wanted to do," says the Peoria, IL, native, who laughs, "Which begs the question of whether this will play in Peoria." Arthur was raised in the college town of Harrisonburg, VA, where his father was a theater professor and his stepmom an art historian at James M