(Old Mill Road Recording, digital)
It’s become almost cliché to claim that certain music “saved” or “rescued” you. Sure, maybe a song did ease the pain of a breakup or soundtrack an amazing summer. But sometimes music literally can save a life.
Case in point: Arlington rapper Benjamin Lerner. A recovering heroin and crack cocaine addict who’s been clean since 2016, Lerner began his sobriety-themed hip-hop career with the release of 2020’s CLEAN. That album was part of a national multimedia push to tell his story and create a source of inspiration for other recovering addicts. With producer and friend Dr. Joshua Sherman, Lerner launched the multiplatform CLEAN campaign, including a weekly column by Lerner in the Vermont News Guide — it also ran online at Seven Days — a radio show on WEQX called “CLEAN Jams” hosted by Lerner and a social media presence that has amassed more than 150 million collective views.
Keep Moving Forward continues Lerner’s mission to document his recovery and urge others struggling with addiction to get — and stay — clean. The five-song EP is the first of a planned trilogy whose titles come from Lerner’s catchphrase: Keep moving forward. Run towards the truth. Don’t quit before the miracle happens. The final two installments are expected to drop later in 2025.
Lerner is the great-grandson of famous American composer Irving Berlin and grandson of journalist Max Lerner. That pedigree showed early in his life as he became a piano prodigy in his early teens. That’s also around the time he first got drunk, which sowed the seeds of an addiction that grew ever more dangerous by his twenties. He eventually found himself penniless, cut off from his family and living on uncooked ramen (when he actually ate), before finally landing in rehab in Pennsylvania.
“I lost too many friends to the needle who are never coming back / I’m not ashamed if you call my music recovery rap,” Lerner begins on EP opener “I’M NOT ASHAMED.” It’s something of a thesis, or maybe a disclaimer: If you’re looking for anything other than recovery anthems and tales of addiction, hop off the ride now. Lerner’s vision is singular, the laser-like focus of a man who knows the danger of romanticizing drugs in music and the ever-present fear of relapse.
Musically, Lerner’s sound emanates from the juxtaposition of his abilities as an MC and a pianist. He uses the latter both as a source of needed melody on these bare-bones tracks and as a rhythmic pulse atop the classic, boom bap-style beats he and Sherman construct. While Lerner raps with flow and acuity, the strength of Keep Moving Forward stems less from his talent as a rapper than from the power of his convictions.
“I hope you know that if you’re struggling with addiction and you miss your kids / you can earn their trust and fix what your addiction did,” Lerner raps on “THE GREATEST GIFT.” As ever, there’s no judgment, just the patient understanding of a man who’s seen the bottom and knows how lonely it is.
Keep Moving Forward is available on major streaming services.
This article appears in Feb 5-11, 2025.
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