Benjamin Lieber is a Beacon musician whose band Marigold (marigold.band) on Tuesday (May 21) will release a song and companion video shot at Quinn’s bar and restaurant on Main Street.
What drew you to Beacon?
The pandemic. My fiancée and I were living in Brooklyn. COVID hit [in 2020] and New York was not fun. We didn’t know where to go — my family is in Buffalo and her family is split between New Jersey and Boston. The Hudson Valley had intrigued me but I didn’t know a ton about the nuances of each town. She had a gut feeling that I would like Beacon. We actually signed a lease on a place here before I even stepped foot in the city. We rented a place for two years and bought a house a year and a half ago.
How did Marigold form?
I have been a musician my entire life and started playing in bands when I was in middle school. Marigold started as a solo songwriting outlet for me. The one record that’s on streaming platforms, I did everything myself. But fast-forward several years, and I met a group of guys doing the same thing and we all agreed that we were looking for an original project we could write music for.
How do you describe the new song, “Weekends With You?”
The song is about embracing the weekend, embracing that feeling of personal time, embracing time away from work and freeing yourself of the pressure to feel like you need to work more or harder. You know, that Friday afternoon feeling of being off the clock. Nothing’s required of you. You could do what you want to do and feel how you want to feel.
Why did you shoot the video at Quinn’s?
We’ve always loved the vibe there — the community they have — and it’s an epicenter for music and artistic people in Beacon. I’m a sucker for vintage, retro stuff, and when I walk into a place like Quinn’s, my mouth is watering. I think that especially in Beacon now, where there’s so much change and turnover and new ways of doing things, it’s important that a place like Quinn’s is maintained and celebrated because it tells a lot of the story of this town. I worked primarily with Yukie [Schmitz], the owner. She’s such an awesome person, and was enthusiastic about the project and the place being documented.
What’s next for Marigold?
We’re about to start releasing a bunch of music from a new record that we have finished. A lot of these songs touch on my mental journey through restructuring what the word “work” meant to me and reevaluating how I wanted work to integrate into the rest of my life in a better balance. We’re a five-piece band now, which is what you see in this video and what this whole new record is. And we’re excited because we’ve pushed ourselves musically.
