Breaking Benjamin
Breaking Benjamin is an American rock band from Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, currently consisting of Benjamin Burnley and Chad Szeliga. The band has released four studio albums to date and a greatest hits album that was released on August 16, 2011. The group initially went on indefinite hiatus due to frontman Benjamin Burnley's recurring illnesses and inability to tour in mid-2010. Further complications arose in August 2011, when it was revealed that members Mark Klepaski and Aaron Fink had been fired from the band.
Breaking Benjamin has sold over five million albums in the US alone. In 1998, Burnley, guitarist Aaron Fink, Nick Hoover and Chris Lightcap formed Breaking Benjamin. Burnley later moved to California to experiment musically. When he moved back to Pennsylvania, he started a band called "Plan 9", playing guitar and singing alongside drummer Jeremy Hummel and bassist, Andy Seal, which was subsequently replaced by Jason Davoli in 2000, and Jonathan "Bug" Price in 2001.
Plan 9 occasionally opened for Lifer at home shows. During one show, Burnley said, “Thank you, we’re Breaking Benjamin”, reclaiming the name from earlier in 1998. After a successful independently-released self-titled EP (which sold all 2,000 printed copies), Breaking Benjamin signed with Hollywood Records in early 2002. They then released their full-length major-label debut, Saturate, on August 27, 2002.
It peaked at #2 on the Billboard Top Heatseekers Chart, and at #136 on the Billboard Top 200. Its first single, "Polyamorous", received moderate radio play but failed to reach mainstream audiences. Three versions of a video for "Polyamorous" were released: one purely live-action footage, one with footage of the video game Run Like Hell and one a variation of the second, but with the Run Like Hell scenes replaced by scenes of people in flirtatious acts. This song was featured on the game WWE SmackDown! vs.
Raw and also featured on WWE Day of Reckoning. The second single was "Skin", which fared worse than "Polyamorous". Burnley has stated his disdain for the song during performances, and encourages the crowd to sing while the band plays. The disdain is because Hollywood Records chose it as the main single instead of the band's choice, "Medicate".
They planned on releasing a studio version of their cover of "Enjoy the Silence" (along with "Lady Bug") on the European version of Saturate, but this version was never released. "Lady Bug" was later released on the So Cold EP, and on the Japanese version of We Are Not Alone. "Wish I May" is played during the closing credits of the 2003 horror film, Wrong Turn.
The Groove is music.nw’s own measure of renown — not an opinion, a fact computed from the record. It weighs reach (how many people engaged) against acclaim (how highly they rated it), balanced so a handful of votes can’t outshout a lasting favourite.
Computed the NeuraWeb way, across the whole record. The same yardstick for everyone — which is why the little-known can out-Groove the famous in their own corner.
How Breaking Benjamin moved
Genre belongs to the record, not to the artist. Every album’s Groove is shared out across the genres it actually is — by how the raters tagged it — so nobody is 100% one thing. Stack that by decade and a career draws itself.
