Lazing in his Ibiza garden one afternoon last spring, Ben Howard experienced what he calls “a strange interlude”. Without warning, for an hour, the Brit award-winning singer-songwriter completely lost his ability to speak.
“All my other senses became really heightened,” he says, via video call from the dressing room of the Coliseu do Porto, where he’s playing later. “It was an overload of information, like the whole world was pouring in at once. I felt really hypersensitive to everything: the light, and the sound of the trees, and the leaves, and the wind … I was still compos mentis, but I didn’t have the words to explain it. It was over in an hour. And then, a month later, it happened again.”
Howard later learned that he had suffered two transient ischaemic attacks (TIAs), also known as mini-strokes. He describes them now as “a before-and-after moment” that profoundly shaped his fifth album, Is It?. Working with Nathan Jenkins, AKA the Bullion, a DJ-producer who first won notoriety layering Beach Boys samples over J Dilla-style beats, Howard has created a record where his voice and guitar interact with inventive electronic elements, manipulated vocal samples and atmospheric drum-machine programming, to “create the story of that experience”.
This new music is a far cry from the earnest folk with which Howard began his career, scoring a Mercury prize nomination with his 2011 double-platinum debut, Every Kingdom. That album was steeped in the influences his parents had schooled him in when he was growing up in Devon – classic singer-songwriters like Simon & Garfunkel, Neil Young and Van Morrison. His favourite, however, was troubled, mercurial maverick John Martyn. “I’m still in love with his records,” Howard says. “My whole guitar setup is ripped off John Martyn’s early 70s rig.”
Two years later, Howard won best British male and British breakthrough act at the Brits, while his second album, 2014’s I Forget Where We Were, topped the UK charts. Success didn’t make Howard very happy, however. In interviews, he bristled at being mentioned in the same breath as the likes of Ed Sheeran and Paolo Nutini, and developed a reputation for tetchiness. “It didn’t have a hugely positive impact on me, if I’m honest,” he says now. “Every artist gets put through the same churning machine when it’s at that scale. It was all quite quick and full-on, and it made me quite guarded and suspicious.”
Cherishing early childhood memories with his father, Howard says that on this album he is “writing about life, love and the savouring of it. Richmond Avenue is about wishing childhood would last for ever – not in a sense of ‘Time is running out!’, but more, ‘What beautiful moments we get to experience sometimes’. I’ve written records about apathy and depression and heavy subjects. This is not that, it’s more an outpouring of affection for people and places.” Feeling hemmed in by the expectations of the industry and his fanbase, Howard says that he grew “creatively restless. I’m always scrambling for new ideas. I have a lot of trouble with what is expected of me, in terms of records. The most difficult thing in creating music is this craving from others for familiarity, a feeling of ownership over you.”
Recent albums have seen Howard try to shake loose those expectations. For 2021’s Collections from the Whiteout, he worked with Aaron Dessner of the National, having fallen under the spell of Big Red Machine, Dessner’s starry collaboration with Bon Iver. “I just loved the sound of their records,” Howard says. “I was quite honest about it: I just wanted to make a record like that.”
Dessner’s approach, the antithesis of his own in the studio, proved a tonic. “Aaron was loose, not fussy. He was really proactive, encouraging me to explore. I’ve overthought previous records, and drawn some of the energy out of them. But with Aaron, I didn’t have to get it right the first time; I could throw things around and see what happened. He’d run drum machines through iPhones!”
Still, for all the experimentation of that collaboration, Is It? marks an emphatic paradigm shift for Howard. “This one was spontaneous, fluid,” he nods, adding that he relished Bullion “presenting me with directions I wouldn’t have thought of myself, these serendipitous moments when we found each other, creatively.” While Howard and Bullion came from different musical worlds, they found much common ground, bonding over a shared obsession with Martyn and working a sample from Linda Thompson’s first solo album into the song Days of Lantana. “I was enamoured with what we were making, and made a decision not to undermine it early on,” Howard says. “We did most of the work on this record in 10 days.”
While he had already begun work on the album before the mini-strokes, the experience “fed into the writing. Lyrically, it was hard to avoid,” he says. “I wrote these songs to see if my faculties could actually maintain the act of songwriting. There was a fear I wouldn’t be able to write songs any more. I was struggling with memory in the fallout of the TIAs, struggling with words, and I was quite tired. But the songs came, and when they did, it was clear that this experience was preoccupying me constantly.”
Is It? is no grim account of a near-death experience. Total Eclipse, a disorientating 90-second interlude matching broken fragments of speech to looped samples and abstract sounds, “recreated the feeling of the experience itself”, he says. “People told me they weren’t sure about it, that it made them uncomfortable. And I realised that was the point, and it was OK.” The opening track, however, references the attack with its refrain of “whistling wind / strange to me”, but its beatific mood and gently wry title, Couldn’t Make It Up, temper any sense of trauma. And But while the spectre of mortality is present on songs such as Days of Lantana (where he sings “days are numbered”) and Richmond Avenue
The powerlessness he felt in the face of the TIAs, he says, fuelled the gently philosophical nature of songs such as Spirit, which is about “how much choice we actually have in the direction of our lives. I just found it incredible that one slight anomaly, a little cell in your brain, can undo this human that you have built over so many years. That it could put you right back to existing in a world that’s simply feelings. If memory is gone, life becomes a very different experience.”
While tests to ascertain what caused the attacks proved inconclusive, Howard says his lifestyle is at least a little healthier than before: he’s a non-smoker now. His darkest moment came when he visited the stroke clinic after the second attack and saw “people who’d had full strokes, people with complete, permanent loss of speech, a loss of faculties. That was quite terrifying.” His relationship with his own mini-strokes, however, is almost sanguine. Rather than an ordeal, these still-unexplained attacks have been for Howard a learning experience, a chance to reacquaint himself with the fragility of life.
“A flood of anxiety came with the first attack – it felt like a falling apart,” he says. “But the second time, when I knew what was happening, I was more comfortable. For an hour, I just existed in a world of confusion, light, sound and feelings.” He grins. “My partner and I had a laugh with it; I tried to read her the text on a cereal box, but all that came out were random words. I was able to sit and wonder about this rogue thing that was happening. It was a brief glimpse into something really strange and surreal.”
He says he doesn’t know if the attacks and his recovery have changed him hugely. “That’s perhaps a question to ask the people around me,” he says. “But I feel more positive and I enjoy small things a lot more; just sitting in the park the other day was very nice. I don’t know if I would have spent time doing that before.” He sighs. “I would probably just have been smoking.”
Is It? is out now.
