100 Greatest songs of the 20’s So Far #44 Ben de la Cour – Stuart Little Killed God (On 2nd Ave)

Released: 2025

Ben de la Cour’s bio reads like a work of Southern Gothic fantasy, including a stint in Cuba training to be a better boxer and then New Orleans, before moving to Nashville in the mid-10’s and issuing a series of albums using that as a base. Possibly the best critical epithet describes him as “A vitriolic Leonard Cohen”, whilst he introduces himself with “I like stories that are specific and I don’t like them to be preachy.”

De la Cour’s sixth album New Roses disappeared almost without trace on release early in 2025, a huge oversight on behalf of the global record buying public (And, let’s face it, not the first). A crepuscular mix of dark skied Americana, woozy atmospherics and roadside blues, it’s centrepiece was the wonderfully titled Stuart Little Killed God (On 2nd Ave), an ode to deicide via cartoon rodent which summed up our 21st century societal ambivalence to anything.

You want the man himself to explain it, right? Here he is then:

“The idea for the song came to me in a dream. I was walking through the streets of Manhattan beneath a gray and black apocalyptic sky. It was hot, and newspapers were blowing all around my feet as I walked into the wind. There were people staggering around like zombies; they had no eyes and their mouths were just holes in their faces. A huge red whirlpool opened in the sky and I grabbed one of the passerby’s and asked them what was going on. “God is dead” they said. And right then I knew, I just knew, that Stuart Little was to blame. Who else could it have been? So I woke up and wrote this song.”