From Ben Howard’s Every Kingdom album, songs like “Keep Your Head Up,” “Bones,” and “Old Pine” prove the undying persistence of authentic songwriting.
Despite mainstream culture’s mostly sidelining of the true songwriting craft post 2000 and this period’s rapid digital music revolution, Howard’s emergence a decade into the new millennium revealed a poetic root humanity can’t easily, fully escape.
Drifting organically between visceral, concrete imagery and a kind of poetic impressionism I have always also favored in my own writing and listening, Howard skillfully invites the listener into an encounter with real and authentic humanity.
In a time of severe overstimulation, loneliness, and mass burnout, this invitation into the real has never been more needed. Singer-songwriters deserving of the moniker have always been disarmingly honest, pouring out from a cultivated interior life, often full of both joy and deep shadows. Howard keep this core alive.
What emerges in his lyrics, like any great from the tradition, is depth, mystery, contrast, and fullness of being — heart-bursting, grief-ridden, ecstatic reality. When this happens, we all become more of what we truly are, rather than diminished by thin egoism and brutish desires.
“Old Pine”
Paired with extraordinary and rare guitar instrumentalism, the album’s exposition in “Old Pine” starts with an extended, building introduction before leading into the opening lines speaking of the still-fresh joy of unmarred youth:
Hot sand on toes, cold sand in sleeping bags
I’ve come to know that memories
Were the best things you ever had
He continues this same unguarded, unashamed theme into the chorus, evoking the similar experiences so many of us have had but which have drifted down under the waters of our years. In the lyrics of “Old Pine” he gives us of the gift of returning to these precious, clear places that we are shocked to still find nestled in our being:
We stood
Steady as the stars in the woods
So happy-hearted and the warmth
Rang true inside these bones
And as the old pine fell we sang
Just to bless the morning
One of the clearest signs of Howard’s genius is this perfect setup which provides both the foundation and foil for some of the album’s later heavier themes. What we encounter is a deeply integrated man who has access and gratitude for what is beautiful and pure, but also a sober ability to stare grief in the face—both his and that of others.
“Bones”
What he expresses in “Bones” on the extended version of the album is utterly haunting. The song seems to be about some kind of childhood female friend or former girlfriend who has drifted into an entrenched habit of promiscuity based in a clear desperation for love. He can still see who she is, and grieves it.
In expressing it well, he successfully stumbles into the cry of every human heart, and especially that of a woman: seeking out love by whatever means necessary, and in a world like ours especially, often the effective but ultimately thin and elusive means of the body. Her grief, too, seeps through to the man who can truly see her, despite her best attempts at covering it all over with carefree laughter:
And you laugh like you’ve never been lonely
That’s alright honey
That’s alright with me
Oh you laugh like there’s hope in the story
That’s alright honey
That’s alright with me
Oh you laugh like I’ll be there to hold you always
Always here
Always, honey, always here
In a turn of the lyrics, Howard reveals the undercurrent explicitly by the end — her utter loneliness under it all, and how she will allow anyone at all to pretend to love her to ease her existential ache for something real which for many reasons, not unlike Dostoevsky’s Natasya, she can’t allow herself to want or accept:
And you love like you’ve always been lonely
That’s alright honey
That’s alright with me
Oh you love him with all of your body
That’s alright honey
That’s alright with me
Oh you love him like he’ll be there for always
Always honey yeah, always near
“Keep Your Head Up”
In “Keep Your Head Up,” the meaning emerges as we hear Howard’s own honest, vulnerable voice. In a world that increasingly disallows honest, sober, proportionate emotion in men — despite the honorable weeping of Homer, Augustine, and Christ himself — it is refreshing to hear masculine strength expressing this very real and human reality of loss and grief. It calls to mind as a motif “Old Pine” and that innocence of childhood he seems to be searching for, especially in the mention of a childhood friend.
He also alludes, amidst his characteristic natural imagery which acts as a continual place of psychological relief for him, to his own drift into promiscuity as a means of covering over the deep, existential wound of his own. It helps explain his capacity for the understanding of the female protagonist of “Bones”:
Now walkin’ back, down this mountain
The strength of a turnin’ tide
Oh the wind’s so soft, and my skin
Yeah the sun was so hot upon my side
Oh lookin’ out, at this happiness
I searched for it between the sheets
Oh feelin’ blind, and realized
There is much more inherent in the album, but Ben Howard’s song are ultimately best experienced via listening. But these integrated themes of loss, love, memory, childhood, redemption, peace, hope, and fighting for a life that is strong, interior, and real reveal a man who has successfully resisted a commercialized career. Instead, Howard chose — and reaped the benefits of through significant commercial attention nonetheless — something timeless and true.
He and relatively few but sufficient others continue to keep the real vocation of an artist alive, passing it like a lit torch carefully in and around the noise of the world.