‘Wrecking ball’ Jesus knocked drugs out of Ben Fuller’s life

By Exjani Rojas —

Ben Fuller only knew Jesus as a swear word.

“Jesus came into my life like a wrecking ball,” Fuller says. He “knocked out the old me. This Jesus thing is really working.”

Now he’s a Christian soulful baritone in the country-rock genre, but that only started 6 years ago. Prior to that, Ben was a lost soul who fell into drinking, drugs, sexual sin and suicidal ideations trying to fill the holes in his soul left by a “broken relationship” with his father.

Ben Fuller grew up on a dairy farm in Perkinsville, Vermont. His dad could never work enough and could not bring himself to say “I love you” to his son. When Grandpa was in his 60s, he divorced Grandma and it messed up Ben’s dad.

“I don’t blame my father because he didn’t know any better,” Ben says. “He didn’t have that. And so, of course, that’s why it’s the same way of me growing up with with Jesus as a swear and not a Savior.”

His love for music stems from hearing Steve Warner blaring from a tape deck out of the cabin of a GMC truck as father and son sold sweet corn at the only stoplight in town.

As he watched other boys get congratulated by their dads or hear spoken words of love, he couldn’t understand at the time time why his own father was so reticent. Struggling with emptiness, guilt, shame and a lack of fulfillment, he was ripe for addiction.

In his adolescence he discovered drugs and it quickly became a coping mechanism for the seeming lack of love. For 14-and-a-half years, he used cocaine, alcohol, sex. There were moments when he stuffed a gun in his mouth but didn’t pull the trigger.

“I was piling hurt on top of hurt on top of hurt,” he says.

He got a degree in landscape design but wondered what his life was really meant to be.

His first music gig was in 2017 at a small bar called Sherry’s Place. Soon, he moved to Nashville, TN, to go all in on music. An early single “Spark” got radio time. But he was still drinking 15-20 beers a night.

When his close friend overdosed, he reflected on his own trajectory. “My best friend, Ryan, shot heroin and died,” he says. He got invited to church and heard the gospel.

I was feeling stuck and in a place of wanting to give up,” Ben says. “Then I called on the name of Jesus: Lord, I got nothing left. I’m drunk-driving home from the bars again. I’m tired. I don’t have any
money. I don’t have any hope and I need some help.”

He got sober and stopped sleeping around. His world changed. In 2020, he released his first album of 10 songs “Witness.” Provident Entertainment signed him in 2022, and his next album “Who I Am” got 20M streams. In June of this year, he released “Walk Through Fire.”

He’s toured with Casting Crowns but considers his pinnacle achievement ministry in prison: San Quentin, Angola and other “tough” places where he’s seeing convicts turn into converts. Violence plummets afterward, Ben says.

“Out of the 14-and-a-half years of being an addict, I never got busted,” he says. “God caught me on the outside (of jail) to send me in (to jail). Some of these guys I’m talking to (in prison) have done a lot less than what I’ve done, and they’re in there for years.”

Ben, whose hair never seems combed, has made his brand being raw and real. “The more secrets I tell, the more free I am,” he says. The more secrets he tells, also the more people who have similarly struggled relate to him and want what God gave him.

He is married to Laura Shebay Fuller.

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