“THE GUITAR IS SUCH A HUGE PLAYING FIELD. PEOPLE GET THEIR KICKS OUT OF IT IN SO MANY DIFFERENT WAYS...”
Ben Howard and John Smith are kindred spirits, new-school folk artists and leading exponents of progressive acoustic guitar. In conversation together, they reveal how their search for new sounds has led them from drop tunings to an “endless” array of effects, and explain why the best guitarists don’t always make the best songwriters…
For all the aesthetic distance between their new albums, there is undeniably a sense of creative kinship between Ben Howard and John Smith. They are at the vanguard of a new generation of singersongwriters who have helped shatter the open-chords-and-capo paradigm that had hitherto been the dominant folk style on acoustic guitar.
Smith’s percussive style and use of alternate tunings – a feature of his debut album from 2006, The Fox And The Monk – might not have been as controversial as Bob Dylan going electric back in the 60s, but it similarly upended the art form. And just as Smith was influenced by the great John Martyn – with whom he also toured – so Howard was inspired by what he heard in Winter, the key song from The Fox And The Monk, in which
Smith married a contemporary folk delivery with a stunning acoustic guitar part that could be exported to a trip-hop setting. “It blew my mind,” Howard says, “and opened my eyes to the idea that you could do anything with the guitar.” Howard would develop this ethos throughout his own career.
The two men have known each other for ten years, and have much in common. As children, they both grew up in Devon, and now both live in rural settings. And in an odd coincidence, their new albums were released on the same day of this year, March 26th. Yet the recordings are coming from quite different places.
Howard’s Collections From The Whiteout was recorded with The National’s Aaron Dessner in New York City and takes a channel-surfing approach to observational poetry, drafting vignettes of lives less ordinary – Richard Russell, a Russian fraudster, a gruesome murder – and scoring them to stylistically adventurous arrangements, with effects-driven textures broadening the guitar’s remit. It was not wholly acoustic.
Neither was The Fray. Produced by Smith and Sam Lakeman, it was tracked in Peter Gabriel’s Real World Studios, Bath, with a number of collaborators – Sarah Jarosz, Courtney Hartman, The Milk Carton Kids, Bill Frisell, Lisa Hannigan – sending in parts remotely. It was only fitting that The Fray opens with Friends; it is an album that finds strength in its others, chipping away at the hard times to let a little optimism in.
For their conversation with TG, Ben speaks from his home in Ibiza, John from North Wales. They begin with a little catching up. John has recently become a father, while Ben talks of finding peace among the almond trees on Mediterranean. They both say that they miss travel, even hungover flights across Europe. Those will return, some day. But for now,
there is much else to discuss, beginning with how each has found the perfect working environment...
You’ve both moved out to the country. There’s some pandemic necessity to that, but how is that sense of peace working for you creatively?
Ben: I think that sitting around, not pressing the issue is quite a comfortable zone in terms of writing. I definitely felt that the move out here was driven by the desire to write freely.
John: Part of it is practical. I disturb my neighbours. When I was in Brighton, trying to make a record, you start off at three in the morning. You come up with an idea, get out of bed to record it, and you are waking up the old lady next door. I just wanted to live somewhere where I wouldn’t disturb anyone. My nearest neighbour is now a half-kilometre away, and that’s a great feeling. Then there is the emotional thing of living among nature, the rhyme and mystery of the natural world.
Ben: It is one thing playing an acoustic guitar in a flat, but as soon as you want to turn it up, it is a big problem. We had a very small apartment in Paris, neighbours above, next to you, and underneath, and I was trying to make these very electrified noises, with a pedalboard, running everything through my Fender Deluxe. But the French don’t mind the noise! It was my inhibitions, and feeling very self-conscious.
John: You don’t want to be heard when you are at that stage of coming up with ideas.
Ben: No, because a lot of it is nonsense!
Isolation is great, but as we’ve learned, only so great. Watching people, observing, that’s fertile ground for ideas…
Ben: I always try to strike that balance. The countryside, having the time and space to be an observer, and the moving around. Your job is just to observe and to be present and accepting enough to write down these little ideas. It doesn’t really matter – the countryside or the city. The most important thing is there is a balance between the two. I am always trying to thread between people and nature.
John, you’ve turned that gaze inwards. Was that the nature of the material?
John: Absolutely. It was songwriting as self-help. In the past, I have always looked to nature and mythology. I have always wanted to write introspective characters, and remove it from myself, and contextualise it with mythology and characters. With this record, we went through a lot last year, and as soon as I picked up a pen, the songs came flying out. Perhaps for the first time, they were all be about me... As a songwriter, you feel egotistical putting all this on the line, that all this is self-indulgent.
Ben: We are allowed to be self‑indulgent!
John: But as it was going by, it felt quite natural. The songs felt as if they might be relatable because so many of us have been going through the same sort of thing in the past year. Feeling distant from our friends. Feeling isolated.
Writing about the self can be a gift for others who see themselves in your experiences.
John: I think as soon as you start writing really honestly about yourself, it becomes universal.
Ben: It’s being comfortable with being able to explore your feelings, from the very basic to the cosmic, and then realising that no two people are that far removed from each other. You are constantly searching for these universalities.
Listening to both of your records side by side, it sounds like you are coming from different places.
John: With this one, I wanted it to be a collaborative effort. I was inviting friends to sing and play on the tracks, but I couldn’t have them for obvious reasons. In the first two days of a seven-day session, we recorded all of my parts, guitar and vocals, and then sent out rough desk mixes to everyone that we wanted involved. Just me on guitar and vocals to Bill
“The best piece of advice I ever got was when my guitar teacher just said, ‘Make sure that every note sounds like music’”
Frisell, and then he would send his part back – he actually sent eleven different parts. All the different flavours of Bill Frisell!
Ben: It is beautiful, Bill’s part. It’s a really special moment on the record. John: It really is, man. He is one of my favourite players. He is a hero of mine. He sent this hour of music to get through. It was the same with Sarah Jarosz sending her vocal part. You know what it’s like, Ben. You hear someone singing something, it can take the song in a different direction because you want to preserve what they’ve done, not crowd it, or maybe you want to orchestrate something that supports it. We were letting these little collaborations steer the direction.
Ben: I totally agree. You are looking for those little triggers. They don’t necessarily come from yourself. Someone can put down a vocal, and off the back of that you will hear a harmony, you will hear a vocal part, or you will remember a poem that you had, or a guitar part.
That’s interesting. You’ve got to be able to listen out for the best idea, to be open to surprise?
Ben: Anyone who plays the tiniest part on a record, writes a record. The whole melting pot and the fusion is where the ideas come from. You don’t just stand there naked and play the song, and ‘Oh yeah, that’s the song.’ The inspiration is picked from so many different places.
And it can be from gear, from a tone, from anywhere…
Ben: I don’t really consider myself a guitarist. I obviously am, and I play the guitar, but I am always searching for little avenues that inspire a song, so whether you find it on a keyboard or a drum pattern, I am just looking for anything that will give that little sparkle of inspiration that a song will roll out the back of.
John: Absolutely. It sounds like we both discovered the 808 around the same time.
Ben: Yeah! Drum machines, it was funny, because your story and my story combine, and it goes way back to percussive guitar, and me seeing you play when I was a lot younger, and you played with John Martyn. That led to working with drum machines, working with keyboards and synths. Fiddling and tinkering, always trying to find new, interesting sounds, almost trying to get away from the guitar.
It sounds like that percussive guitar was all about getting more out of the acoustic, transcending it almost.
John: I only realised that later. When I was leaning really heavily into that style of playing.
Ben: Well you were bloody good at it! John: Thanks! It just had to serve the song. Anything like that has to be part of the song, and if it isn’t part of the song then you shouldn’t be doing it. Ben: Yeah, it gets to the point where it starts detracting from it. We are probably in the same boat. It was a spectacle. Your song Winter was the cornerstone for a lot of people to realise where the guitar could go in a song. Erik Mongrain was another one. Jon Gomm... Beautiful, incredible guitarists, beautiful parts, but it is very difficult to get a song out of these things.
Is that something you want to get away from?
John: It can get overwhelming very quickly. If I watch a whole gig of that stuff... I was just obsessed about being absolutely the best guitar player
I could be, and compared myself to other people. You very quickly realise that doesn’t go anywhere, because there is always someone who is going to be more proficient. Did you ever see Johnny Dickinson, the slide player from up in the Borders?
Ben: No. I didn’t
John: He passed away a couple of years ago, but he was on tour with a very famous pyrotechnic guitar player – whose name I won’t mention – and I went to see Johnny play, and after his set we were watching the star act, and Johnny whispered in my ear, ‘I can only hear so much before I want to hear a f*ckin’ song!’ I thought, ‘That’s it!’ I am always looking for the song, and it was only after years of playing percussively, [I learned] how to hold a pick and how to play in standard tuning. Then I found that,
actually, there are a lot of songs to be written.
Ben: I think I went in the other direction at that point. Finding drop tunings at an early age, realising that I would never go back to standard tunings, and just going down the wormhole of drop tunings and delay pedals.
John: Yeah, delay pedals, man. The tape delays on this record sounds gorgeous.
Ben: Thanks, we experimented with it live. We had Echoplexes live. We had all-sorts.
Those delays are really integral to your sound now…
Ben: On my last record, I was playing an upside-down Silvertone – the foil pickups sounded incredible. I had it in really simple drop-d tuning, and I realised that with a delay pedal you don’t have to do that much to make quite complex, interesting rhythmic patterns. I found myself playing upside-down guitar. That was probably the same as the percussive thing. All your picking was upside‑down.
But effects made it possible?
Ben: All of a sudden, I was touring with two Echoplexes, a chorus, delay, all analogue gear, and a load of upside‑down guitars, wondering what the f*ck I was doing! I made a world of hell for myself. Steve, my guitar tech, he is a true professional. Nothing fazes him.
John: I remember trying to soundcheck at the Barbican, when I was over with John Martyn. It was the biggest gig I had played by a long way, and I didn’t get a soundcheck because they were onstage trying to unf*ck his tape echo. It was one of the big, original Space Echoes and there was smoke coming out of it. I bought myself a Strymon in the end.
Do you both use Strymon?
John: I’ve got one of those Volante echoes. That is all over the record. You can just squish it just a little, so that a chord just sounds kinda bendy, like it is going through an old cassette. I love that. That’s magic.
Ben: I love a soft chorus or a rotary. I am forever playing around with them. Strymon? My go-to is the Deco, for the saturation, and I use the slap-back as a delay. I think the combination of pedals is endless. That is the next wormhole. My thing is atimeline through a Big Muff
– very Martyn-inspired. As soon as I got out of that little flat in Paris and I could make noise, I was playing through a Moogerfooger and a delay. It sounds ridiculous talking about it now! Aaron (Dessner) was the only person who said, ‘You know what? We could work with that.’
John: Is that what is going on in the first track [ Follies Fixture], because there is a synth arpeggio that sounds to me like fingerstyle going through
“I swear by Johnny Marr’s theory that every guitar has a certain amount of songs in it”
a chain of Star Trek dashboard effects? Ben: That is actually me playing keys through an arpeggiator. The Strange Last Flight Of Richard Russell and Finders Keepers, that’s a guitar through a Moogerfooger. I am giving away all the secrets now. But the thing is, you’ll never be able to find it. I am really worried about the time I am going to have to recreate it.
It’s extra, though, couldn’t you take it all away and the song would work?
Ben: That’s the theory. This record is the first time where I have started to have a bit of trouble with that. But that is the writing process. I didn’t write as much on guitar. I wrote to loops or drumbeats, random sections of poems.
John: I really like the moments when it drops back to the guitar, though. Especially whenever I can hear a low C on an acoustic guitar. I just get this nice feeling.
Ben: This is the metaphysics of the guitar world. I am always looking for the randomiser effects that make something special. Drop-c is one of them. I swear by Johnny Marr’s theory that every guitar has a certain amount of songs in it. I religiously believe that.
John: There is something to that, for sure. I bought a nylon-string for the first time in my life, and I picked it out of the case and wrote two songs in a day that made it to the record. Sometimes you do just need a new tool.
Ben: Perhaps that’s where pedals come in, just to give you that little bit of excitement and get over the edge.
What guitars did you use on the albums?
John: I have two main electric guitars, both of which are Fender, but neither were built by Fender. They are just bits of guitars stuck together. That is a ’74 neck. I bought the body on ebay for about 20 quid. All the slide guitar work on the record is on the Strat. Those Lollar Gold Foils, you play slide on them and the note just hangs in the air. I have that classical guitar I mentioned, and I have my
Fylde acoustics. This Fylde has a [Mike Vanden] Mimesis pickup, and I have that going into an amp through the chorus effect on the Strymon Blue Sky.
Ben: It’s so funny that we have both ended up in the same boat with guitar pickups after all these years! He’s cracked it. Finally.
John: He’s nailed it. I have another output and there is a little LR Baggs microphone pickup as well, so I have the Mimesis going through my pedalboard and the Baggs going clean into the house, and the engineer can do whatever they want with it.
Ben: I had a 20s little parlour guitar, a Little Martin, a Martin 12-string, and then I think my go-to has been this old 70s D-28, but other than that, tons of electrics. I have a Fender Jazzmaster from the 60s. I was limited as to how much gear
I could take to New York.
Finally, you speak of percussive guitar becoming this spectacle. With social media incentivising grandstanding to the point of being anti-art, where do you see the future of guitar playing going?
Ben: Ultimately, the guitar is such a huge playing field. People get their kicks out of it in so many different ways. You only have to do a bit of travelling in Indonesia and realise that everyone can play flawless Jimi Hendrix. There is no right or wrong. I think it is difficult to find that peace and quiet and find where you fit in, finding your craft and working at it. I turn on the Moogerfooger! But that’s me.
John: There is no point in trying to be anyone else. It is about doing something that is either serving the song or your own satisfaction. The best piece of advice I ever got was when I had guitar lessons. I was about 20. I was learning scales and my teacher just said, ‘Make sure that every note sounds like music.’
“This is the metaphysics of the guitar world. I am always looking for randomiser effects that make something special”