In memoriam

Ben Auburn, 1972-2000

by Matt Ashare

Last week the Phoenix received the sad news that Ben Auburn, a locally based writer, editor, and Phoenix contributor, was dead at the age of 27. Auburn, who lived in Somerville with his wife, Charlotte Burgess Auburn, had been hospitalized with bacterial pneumonia when he succumbed to the illness on Sunday, January 9.

Auburn moved to the Boston area to work in publishing after graduating from Oberlin College in Ohio. He eventually landed a job handling production and layout for the then-bimonthly American Prospect, where he remained for two years. Last fall, the Atlantic Monthly took him on as special-projects manager, which entailed compiling and editing the arts-and-entertainment preview section the magazine runs nine months a year.

But Auburn's true interests and ambitions lay more in the direction of cultural and, especially, music criticism. He wrote on music-technology topics such as the spread of MP3 files on the Internet for Atlantic Unbound, the magazine's Web site. And he had also begun to freelance more widely, writing record reviews for the Web-based music publication SonicNet, essays and reviews for the webzine Smug, and witty commentaries on topics like holiday-music CDs and the art of the British music biography for Student.com. Auburn even had his own Web site, http://www.plank.net, where he posted all his essays and reviews and kept a running log of what he was listening to. You can still access Auburn's writings there; he made his last entry on January 3, when he was listening to Throwing Muses' "University" ("It doesn't at all sound dated to me, but maybe that's because I'm getting old") and his favorite white funk band, Royal Crescent Mob, who he said "definitely sound dated."

Auburn's first Phoenix story, a review of Dennis Perrin's Mr. Mike: The Life and World of Michael O'Donoghue, appeared in the August 1998 Phoenix Literary Supplement. Later that same year, Auburn contacted me about writing for the music section. And he became a regular contributor to the "Off the Record" column in 1999, penning more than a dozen top-notch reviews of new CDs by artists as diverse as Julian Lennon, the London Suede, and, one of his favorites, Super Furry Animals.

It's an odd symptom of the "e" era that Auburn and I never actually met and didn't even speak on the phone more than a couple of times. Instead, we e- mailed back and forth about new CDs he was interested in reviewing, CDs I thought he might like to hear, etc. Nevertheless, I came away with the sense that Ben was a bright, promising, and refreshingly humble critic who was on his way to developing a strong voice and finding the right forum for his writings. And we were both certain that he would become an increasingly integral part of the Phoenix music section.