Seven Things I Have Unwillingly Learned About Benson Boone

Welcome back to the Jude Doyle Project Announcement Blitz, wherein I fling a new project announcement at you every two seconds until you give up and follow someone with a chiller work ethic.

DILF: Did I Leave Feminism, my third book of non-fiction, is still available for pre-order, and will come out October of 2025.

Moreover: My new horror comic, Be Not Afraid – featuring truly staggering art by Lisandro Estherren – is out in June. Learn what it's about and read the opening pages here, and ask your comic store to stock it, because they won't care if you don't.

If you’re a childless adult in a coastal city, you could probably go your whole life without learning anything about Benson Boone. Like Taylor Sheridan shows, or the Minions, the current Rolling Stone cover boy — whose hit song “Beautiful Things” has been hailed as “a prototype, engineered in a remote Walgreens lab dedicated to building the perfect drugstore song” and “annoying” — has become massively successful without ever being cool. 

You know who loves Benson Boone, though? Second-graders. Elementary-school kids love Benson Boone, and I have one, and thus, his deeply uncool music soundtracks every moment of my every day. For this, I have sworn to destroy him. Before I do, though, I pass on these crucial Benson Boone Facts, each and every one of which I have learned against my will. 

#1: He’s not Imagine Dragons! 

When my daughter’s room began emitting a 24-hour stream of pounding percussion and mid-range male vocal yelping, I naturally suspected Imagine Dragons. It is, after all, thanks to parenthood that I know what Imagine Dragons sounds like; some time ago, a movie about dragons hired Imagine Dragons to do a song about dragons, and my kid wound up listening to it for months on end. 

If you can imagine music that sounds exactly like this, but is somehow not this — the  wailing, percussion-whacking Pepsi to Imagine Dragons’ whooping, demi-rapping Coke — that’s what Benson Boone sounds like. 

Fortunately, there’s an easy way to tell the difference: One of these songs is by Imagine Dragons, and is about dragons, for a movie about dragons. One of them is by Benson Boone, and exists for no good reason at all.