BEN HOWARD feared the worst after suffering two mini-strokes. Now he returns with his most adventurous album to date. “The guitars,” he says, “are doing weird things…”
When singer-songwriter Ben Howard appeared on the scene a little over a decade ago, scoring a top 10 hit with his debut album Every Kingdom,his music felt special because it had an uncanny ability to transport those who listened directly back to the greatest summer they’d ever had. His idiosyncratic “pick and go” acoustic style and percussive lap tapping techniques intrigued general listeners and guitarists alike, and set him apart from the main crop of singalong strummers.
Two Brit Award wins in 2012 made him a household name, and his homespun brand of beachy fireside folk pulled whopping festival crowds around the globe. But, never entirely at ease with his burgeoning pop star status – let alone the prospect of being forever typecast as Devon’s answer to Jack Johnson – pandering to popular demand and making another Every Kingdom has never been on Ben’s agenda. A boundless musical curiosity, “enticed and excited by little audio moments”, has led him into fresh sonic territories with every subsequent release.
2014’s I Forget Where We Were saw the first introduction of electric guitars. 2018’s Noonday Dream embraced more ambient textures and experimental sounds, and Ben first began “sticking guitars through Moogs” during the recording of 2021’s Collections From The Whiteout.
“I’m very instinctive and impulsive when I play and not necessarily as traditional as people think I am,” he says, speaking from the comfort of his sofa where he keeps a somewhat approximately tuned Martin Dreadnought Junior within reach for casual noodling purposes. The guitar is one of only a handful of acoustics to actually make it onto his latest studio effort, a beautifully splintered folktronica masterpiece titled Is It?.
“I usually play in open C, and this had just sort of slowly dropped through the years that it’d been sat on the sofa,” he demonstrates. “It had never been tuned – just to itself – and it had been slowly falling through the bottom parameters of what an acoustic should do. It ended up making a feature on the record, just because it had this real scooped sound with a really bright top end, not much in the mid-range and then really low bottom strings.”
Happening upon “titbits” of sonic interest such as this is what kick-starts Ben’s creative process, and although other acoustic elements do feature on Is It?, they do so in what he describes as a “textural” way, rather than as a fundamental means of self ‐accompaniment.
“You can’t beat 12-string overdubs and the tactility of frets on a
