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Ben Fugate is the product of many things: the rural Southeastern Kentucky landscape he calls home, the belting of gospel vocals behind shoddy guitar amplifiers at the Pentecostal church he spent most Sundays, and the hardships that come with being a young adult in a town he loves, which both time and the rest of the world have seemingly passed by. Ben chose the path of music from an early age, donning the famous studded apparel of Elvis Presley and impersonating at his family gatherings as a young boy, playing Lynyrd Skynyrd songs to an amphitheater of his high school peers in talent shows, and forming his first band after graduation, spending all his time in a sweltering garage with his buddies coming up with melodies and singing every John Mellencamp song he knew. The influences Ben draws from range greatly, from the high twanged vocal acrobatics of The Osborne Brothers to the heart-tugging slow country warbles of Vern Gosdin. The influence of Joe Diffie, Hank Williams, Keith Whitley, George Jones, Travis Tritt, Bob Seger, Eagles, and Charlie Daniels are all evident in the music that Ben makes, but he is not his influences. Like any great artist, he is merely a vessel that channels all the great emotional highs and lows across the vast history of country music and makes them his own. This is before accounting for his equally incredible group, The Burning Trash Band, a band of music vets who always display their tight guitar work and clock-like rhythm section both in shows and in the booth. Ben Fugate and The Burning Trash have only been a collective for 2 years, and they have been constantly working towards honing their sound, adjusting melodies and delivery, and obsessively messing with tone. What Ben and his band of honky-tonk heroes seek to achieve is none other than their own perfect vision of what country music is to them. And with every show, every record, every practice, every lyric, and every broken guitar string, they come that much closer.
