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The profile · researched 29 September 2026
Benjamin Tod buried his own band, then wrote his way back to country music
The Tennessee-born songwriter behind Lost Dog Street Band spent 2026 releasing two records and touring behind a new honky-tonk band, The Inline Six, while saying openly that he would rather be running heavy equipment on his Kentucky property than be on a stage at all.
Cottontown, freight trains and Lower Broadway
Benjamin Tod Flippo was born on 11 November 1990 and grew up in Cottontown, Tennessee. He was given a guitar at seven and left it alone until he was fourteen, when a friend's father handed him a Fullerton parlour guitar; he learned on that. As a teenager he rode freight trains, and he played for tips on Nashville's Lower Broadway — the education he later credited when he described his 2024 solo record Shooting Star as a homecoming to the music he had absorbed busking on that strip.
In 2010 he formed Lost Dog Street Band with Ashley Mae, who sings and plays fiddle and whom he married; the name came from their yellow Labrador, Daisy. Jeff Loops joined on bass, and the Grand Ole Opry's own artist page files them as an after-dark country trio who have worked together since 2011. The group built its audience outside the Nashville machine, crowdfunding records and selling them direct, and released through the independent Anti-Corp before Tod's recent albums arrived via Thirty Tigers.
Tod has not been discreet about the years that fed the songs. Addiction, homelessness and the deaths of friends run through the catalogue, and he has been consistent in refusing to disown that period — the argument in his writing is that the man who came out of it and the man who went into it are the same person, and that pretending otherwise would make the songs untrue.
The band he tried to retire
The commercial breakthrough was Weight of a Trigger in 2019, which reached number five on the Billboard bluegrass albums chart that April. Alongside it Tod kept a parallel solo catalogue running — I Will Rise in 2017, A Heart of Gold Is Hard to Find in 2019 and Songs I Swore I'd Never Sing in 2022 — recorded with deliberate austerity, one of them cut with two microphones and no overdubbing at all.
After Glory in 2022 he decided Lost Dog Street Band was finished, and said so publicly. The reversal came from the work rather than from a change of heart about touring: having recorded a solo album in January 2023, he looked at the songs he had stockpiled and concluded they belonged to the band. His own account is blunt — he thought he was done with Lost Dog, then went through what he had ready for a new record and changed his mind.
The result was Survived in 2024, tracked live in five days rather than built up by overdub, a method change Ashley Mae described as seeing the project reinvigorated in a completely different spirit and light. She also framed what the title was pointing at, saying the two of them had been through professionally grinding and demoralising personal times over the previous five years. A concert album, Live From A Mile High, followed in 2025.
Picking a fight with the genre
Shooting Star, in 2024, was the pivot away from string-band folk towards honky-tonk, outlaw and red dirt. Tod called it almost a spite album, made to prove what he could do as a writer in whatever medium he stepped into. Late 2025 singles pushed further in that direction: "My Pride", a collaboration with fiddle player Matt Heckler, and a reading of Waylon Jennings's "Outlaw Shit" cut with Shooter Jennings.
On 14 November 2025 he announced a new backing band, The Inline Six, and a coast-to-coast 2026 tour, with an artist pre-sale on 18 November and general sale on 21 November. Three days after the announcement he gave an interview that set the tone for the year, complaining about what he called a freshman class in the alternative-country scene who think country music is only made by upper-class white boys with mullets, and about how little of the genre's history the newer audience knows.
That argument is not separate from the records — it is the thesis behind both of them. The reorganisation had a practical cause too: Ashley Mae was expecting the couple's first child, which put Lost Dog Street Band's touring on hold and left Tod needing a band that could play the country material without her fiddle at its centre.
Two albums in one year
Vengeance & Grace arrived on 17 April 2026 through Thirty Tigers, his twelfth studio album and his fifth outside Lost Dog Street Band. The conceit is ten original songs recorded twice: once with the full country band, once stripped to an "(Alone)" acoustic take, the two halves sequenced to stage the split the title names. Andrija Tokic produced, Billy Contreras played fiddle, and the players were the group that became The Inline Six. The songs include "Vengeance and Grace", "Martyr of a Man", "The Bottle's Gone", "End of My Rope" and "My Pride".
Reception was strong on the band half and cooler on the mirror. Saving Country Music scored the full-band "Vengeance" sequence 8.3 out of ten and the complete double 8.1, calling it more recognisably a Benjamin Tod project than Shooting Star was, singling out "It's What You Meant" for a melody that finds an unexpected prettiness in his voice, and objecting that the acoustic versions sound thin next to the arrangements they follow. The same review described Tod as pointedly opinionated and quick to pass judgement, which he has never disputed.
Country Is Dead followed on 4 September 2026, also on Thirty Tigers and digital only: twelve covers running from Jimmie Rodgers's "Waiting for a Train" and Hank Williams's "Alone and Forsaken" through Merle Haggard, George Jones, Don Williams, Ricky Skaggs, Larry Sparks, Hank Locklin, Bob Dylan's "Only a Hobo", Billy Joe Shaver's "Ragged Old Truck" and Keith Whitley's "Turn This Thing Around". Tod's stated rule for the project was that covers either need to be done differently or done better, so he set out to rearrange and in places rebuild the standards outright. He has told interviewers that two further albums were recorded during 2026, one at the Bomb Shelter in Nashville and one in Los Angeles with Shooter Jennings.
A very long road for someone who dislikes the road
The 2026 run opened on 16 April at Ozark Music Hall in Fayetteville, Arkansas, took in Stagecoach at the Empire Polo Club in Indio on 25 April and The Regency Ballroom in San Francisco the following night, and is scheduled to close on 25 October at The Mill & Mine in Knoxville. It included the first two-night stands of his career: Revolution Hall in Portland, Oregon on 24 and 25 July, Higher Ground Ballroom in South Burlington, Vermont on 8 and 9 October, and The Orange Peel in Asheville on 23 and 24 October. The autumn leg restarts on 1 October at Bogart's in Cincinnati and runs through the Roxian Theatre near Pittsburgh on 4 October, the State Theatre in Portland, Maine on 10 October, Bowery Ballroom in New York on 13 October and The Fillmore Charlotte on 20 October. Ticketing pages carry both billings — some dates advertised as Benjamin Tod & The Inline Six, others still listed under the Lost Dog Street Band name — which is worth checking before assuming which band is on stage.
None of this comes with any enthusiasm for touring, and Tod has stopped pretending otherwise. He has said plainly that he is not dying to be on the road and that it is not something he personally values, preferring work with his hands, diesel engines, running heavy equipment and maintaining the Muhlenberg County, Kentucky homestead he and Ashley Mae keep. The touring is the cost of the records, and he talks about it that way.
What that produces on stage is an unsentimental show from a performer with no interest in the ceremony around it — which, given the material, suits it.
The show, now
A 2026 show runs about sixteen songs — fourteen in the main set and a two-song encore, on the evidence of the setlists logged so far — and leans hard on the current record: "Vengeance and Grace" opens, with "End of My Rope", "Long Gone", "Border Jumper", "Goner", "Every Dog Has Its Day" and "My Pride" through the middle, before "Hell I Have", "Ticket Home" and "I Ain't Bound". Three covers sit inside that frame, all of them arguments about lineage rather than crowd-pleasers: Billy Joe Shaver's "Ragged Old Truck", Jimmie Rodgers's "Waiting for a Train" and Waylon Jennings's "Outlaw Shit". The encore has settled into "Shooting Star" and "Wyoming". The Inline Six play it as a country band with fiddle and steel rather than the string-band instrumentation Lost Dog Street Band audiences know, so older songs arrive re-dressed. Staging is plain and the rooms are mid-sized: theatres and ballrooms in the 700 to 2,000 range, with the 10 July Milwaukee date at Vivarium running doors at seven and stage at eight, supported by Leon Majcen. Coleman Jennings shared the tour's opening bill in Fayetteville on 16 April. Support is booked regionally rather than as one fixed package, so the opener changes city to city. Published reviews of this particular run are scarce — fan-logged setlists are the main record of it so far, and even setlist.fm's 2026 average is built from only two usable logs of eight — so anyone expecting a documented consensus on the live show will not find one yet.
Researched from en.wikipedia.org · en.wikipedia.org · savingcountrymusic.com · savingcountrymusic.com · broadwayworld.com · whiskeyriff.com · americansongwriter.com · gratefulweb.com
Pictures
Photographs from Wikimedia Commons, credited
Vjarizpe · CC BY-SA 4.0
