“THE GUITAR IS SUCH A HUGE PLAYING FIELD. PEOPLE GET THEIR KICKS OUT OF IT IN SO MANY DIFFERENT WAYS...”
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 singer-songwriters 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 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
