BEN Caplan is a Canadian songwriter who merges traditional Jewish and Eastern European folk stylings with a more conventional rock setup.

Before a gig in Brighton with his band The Casual Smokers last week, Caplan spoke to EDWIN GILSON about his “epiphany” in music and his businessman-like approach to his career.

You played The Great Escape earlier this year – how did you find it?

This was my third time at the festival. It was really wonderful. The second time in Brighton we played the Unitarian Church and we did it again this year. We also played the Green Door Store where there was literally a line around the corner. We’re blessed to have had a great reception in Brighton and we hope it will be the same this time.

You worked with many different musicians on your last album – is that wide array of musical talent reflected in the live show?

We tried to take the Sergeant Pepper approach in creating sounds I knew we’d never be able to reproduce live. We had string quartets and horn ensembles and I invited Eastern European Roma to come and perform traditional Romanian sounds. Most of the songs were written just with me and guitar so all these elements were added in later.

You’re inspired by Eastern European and Jewish folk traditions – do you have personal roots in those areas?

Yes. I was raised Jewish so I heard lots of traditional Jewish music. I never really thought of it as music, though, if you know what I mean. I was more into jam bands and prog rock. And then there was a certain point in my early twenties when I heard those traditional sounds in a new context and I thought they really speak to my soul. I don’t really hear them reflected in contemporary music. It was an interesting mission for me to try and incorporate some of those elements into the music.

When you say you heard them in a new context, how do you mean?

Well, there was an epiphany moment that happened to me when I was backpacking in Europe in my twenties. I saw this brass band performing in front of a cathedral and all those sounds and styles that I had only heard before in a synagogue all came back to me. I heard these similar scales being played and thought, “wow, this is a sound that seems like mine”.

Can you talk about participating in Coalition Music, a Canadian scheme to help musicians’ own brands, and what that experience taught you?

That wasn’t an inconsequential step on my path but I kind of stumbled into it. I was there to make connections with the Canadian music industry and the operators or gatekeepers of the scene. I’ve always seen myself as an entrepreneur. Before my first album I drafted myself a 17-page business plan and I approached my career with that mindset. That helped me to refine my thinking and get to know how to be successful in the music game.

Have you roughly followed the business plan?

We can’t ever plan what the world can turn into – there have definitely been surprises. Three months into my business plan, my band collapsed. Partly because they didn’t agree with the business choices I had made. I said to them, “you all signed up to this business plan.” They said: “It was 17 pages long, you can’t expect us to read all that.” There were many different challenges along the way.

Back in 2010, it was the case that I had a group of musicians and we were seen as a collective but I was calling all the shots. At a certain point they said, “if we’re not being paid on a daily basis, we want to make decisions as to how the money is spent”. We tried that but it didn’t work. Now, I have good relationships with everyone in my band but they are all contracted. That allows me to be executor of my own will.

You can read a review of Ben Caplan's show here