“Conrad” by Ben Howard, Thursday, May 16, 2024
Ben Howard hails from the Southwestern town of Richmond in London, though he is an avid Liverpool football fan. He grew up playing several instruments before showing ultimate devotion to playing guitar. Six months before graduating with a Journalism degree, Howard decided to pursue music full-time. Howard’s dark folk music was influenced by Joni Mitchell, Van Morrison, and Simon & Garfunkel, and his unique guitar playing is a key feature of his music. He plays a left-handed guitar and sometimes a right-handed guitar upside down. He uses alternate tunings and often plays his acoustic guitar percussively.
YOU WERE THE BOAT THAT BREACHED. Ben Howard released an independent EP in 2008 and signed to Island Records in 2011. Later that year, he released his Mercury- Prize-nominated debut album, Every Kingdom. Howard’s sound evolved on subsequent releases from acoustic folk to indie rock on his sophomore album, I Forget Where We Were, to experimental electronic music on his latest release, 2023’s Is It? Today’s song, “Conrad,” comes from Howard’s sophomore record. I Forget Where We Were, released in 2014, received generally favorable reviews, though Stephen Thomas Erlewine’s review on AllMusic stated in his review of the album: “Howard expects you to meet him on his own terms and provides just enough aural enticement to give him not just one listen but a second, which is when I Forget Where We Were really begins to sink in its hooks.” In a music industry that demands hooks even of its folk singers, the balancing act of artistic vision and listener gratification is delicate. Personally, I find that albums that don’t give me everything I want in favor of the artist’s vision tend to be what makes me go for repeat listens. In the CD age, when music was an investment, established artists could take bigger risks. CDs were expensive and fans listened as part of a musical investment. But in the streaming era, a band releases something uncatchy, listeners think it’s a bad album and move on.
WE WILL NEVER BE THE CHANGE IN THE WIND AND THE SEA. “Conrad” is perhaps the catchiest song on I Forget Where We Were. I first heard it in the fall of 2015 at Starbucks. The track is unassuming until the chorus and the post- chorus. The song begins with a plucked electric guitar that sounds. The verse contrasts with Ben Howard’s unique higher-than-usual folk voice and slurred articulation when the song begins. I picture the guitar sometimes in the verses being a bit of a stray strand of hair that won’t cooperate in the morning. The chorus has a two-chord War-on-Drugs effect. Howard allows the song to breathe in these two chords, eventually fading out with a guitar solo. The lyrics of the song are sparse, and Howard’s singing is hard to understand at first. “Conrad” refers to the 1917 short story “The Tale” by Joseph Conrad. The fogginess of Howard’s lyrics matches with Conrad’s ambiguous tale of suspected war profiteering. It’s a tale of otherworldly loneliness and the guilt from possible war crimes. With some focused listening to “the tale of” Howard’s I only hear the theme of loneliness. The reflective outro seems to be a meditation on the loneliness felt when being alone at sea. We are left realizing that “We will never be the change to the weather and the sea.”
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