Ben Deschamps

Ben Deschamps has had enough random jobs that he would ordinarily only qualify for a career as an SF writer. Oddly enough, despite a potentially lucrative academic background in Classics and Middle English Philology, he's turned his back on this career (highlights include farming, teaching, construction, night shifts at Mac's Milk and gravedigging) - his last day of "real" work being more than five years ago - and has become a full-time musician. A lifelong SF fan, he has moved through musical genres like he has moved through jobs, and has played space rock, folk, Celtic, jazz, bluegrass, punk and the screamingest of screaming heavy metal, on a variety of instruments and continents.

He has toured with Heather Dale throughout Europe and North America and has recorded and co-produced several albums with her.

Whenever they are not touring (this is not often) he hides in his log cabin in the Ottawa Valley with his 24-track recording studio, dozens of instruments, and a large collection of splitting axes; urban luxuries such as central heating being largely unknown in his neck of the woods.

Representative work for the 2009 Pegasus Awards (Note: this song is NOT a Pegasus nominated song- it is a representative work for Best Performer and/or Best Writer/Composer categories):

Fisherman's Boy

by Heather Dale & Ben Deschamps
Copyright Amphisbaena Music, 2007- All Rights Reserved
Used by Permission

Fisherman's boy with a bucket of water
goes walking each day on the shore
Looking in tidepools and crannies
for fish that were stranded
Sure-handed he'd gather them all
Throwing them back to the ocean
Back to the living once more

Soon he was throwing the nets like his father
And hauling them back to the shore
Taking the time to be careful and sort the unneeded
from those he would stow in the hold
Throwing them back to the ocean
Back to the living once more

He went down in a storm near the rocks of Point Cleary
They searched 'til the night drove them home
But in the morning they found him, alive and unbattered
Where shattered wood littered the stones
He'd been thrown back from the ocean
Back to the living once more

So fisherman's boy with a son and a daughter
goes walking each day on the shore
Looking in tidepools and crannies
for fish that were stranded
Sure-handed they gather them all
Throwing them back to the ocean
Back to the living once more

Throwing them back to the ocean
Back to the living once more