Jon Boden’s new album, Last Mile Home (reviewed here), is the conclusion of a post-climactic change trilogy that began with 2009’s Songs from the Floodplain.
Folk Radio UK chatted to Jon about the new album, the recent Bellowhead reunion and the much-anticipated return of Spiers and Boden, as well as the challenges of wild swimming.
Well, Last Mile Home, is the final part of a trilogy of albums that are all set in a kind of post-climate-change future, and the first of those three, Songs from the Floodplain, was sort of a general exploration of the ideas and the setting. But then, with Afterglow, I got into actually having quite a specific story to tell over the album, quite a small little story, just the story of one night in a city street carnival, and so I’m kind of following on that approach with Last Mile Home.
So this is the story of the journey from landlocked moors in the middle of England, somewhere, not dissimilar to Sheffield, where I live, and to the coast, by an older couple who have spent their lives kind of hidden away and watching from a distance as the landscape gradually empties of human life as people migrate over the sea, over to the continent, for whatever reason, and so it’s a sort of final farewell by them to this landscape as they head to the sea.
I guess both albums, in a way grow out of the first. Both Afterglow, and Last Mile Home, have grown out of threads from Songs from the Floodplain. There’s quite a lot in Floodplain about nature taking over what has been abandoned by mankind. There’s this song, ‘Going down to the wasteland’, which is all about sneaking into the ruins of the city down the valley, and Afterglow takes that idea and explores it a bit further. With Last Mile Home, the initial impetus was to go a little bit deeper and closer, looking at the ivy growing over the barbed wire, sort of thing.
Nature, and in particular the contrast between urban and country is a theme explored throughout the trilogy. With Last Mile Home the rebirth of the natural world becomes the dominate theme. For Jon, the footprints of mankind on the soil and land, through industry and geography are a potent symbol of our impact, made ever more so in an album exploring a post-climactic change world.
I’ve always been more drawn to nature reclaiming rather than nature in its pure state, I mean, it is difficult to find nature in its pure state, because generally speaking landscapes, certainly in Europe, have always been affected by mankind, but I’ve always found it more poignant to go walking in places where there are old ruins or where you can see the impact of man upon nature, but where nature absorbed everything that’s been thrown at it and come out on top.
It’s quite an abstract thing, isn’t it, because you can feel very hopeful about the idea that nature will survive us, even though inherently that’s quite a depressing idea! The concept of us, you know, not surviving! And there is that sense that whatever we do to ourselves, and, of course, to nature as well, we shouldn’t underestimate how much destruction we are capable of, but at the same time, nature always bounces back and that is a hopeful thing. Maybe it’s a hopeful thing metaphorically as well. Maybe that gives us a sense of our own capacity to bounce back. Maybe.
The theme of a journey, both physical and metaphorical provides the narrative thrust of Last Mile Home. At a time when our own journeys are curtailed, the album provides a meditative, philosophical exploration of the power of journeying, especially that of walking.
I had decided on the idea of a journey before lockdown. I did write a lot of it and record all of it in lockdown, and I think that has certainly come through in just the mood of it. Because I mean it is an album about being alone in the landscape, and actually, lockdown has kind of done that for us all because the only thing we’ve been able to do most of the year is go out for walks, but by ourselves, so I think there’s been quite a lot of resonance for me writing it in this situation.
Last Mile Home sees a return to more traditional sounds, added to this the sense of seasons changing, from autumn to spring provides the trilogy with a sense of optimism and rebirth. For Jon, this was always crucial to the trilogy’s structure.
Afterglow was very much set in November, and I quite liked the idea of a sound like a band that might have been cobbled together in this street carnival, old jerry-rigged amps and bits of stuff lying around, so I was trying to go for a kind of street carnival, garage sound, whereas Last Mile Home is very much set in late spring, early summer. And, when you’re thinking about the idea of a world where the landscape is left alone by mankind, it doesn’t feel right to have too many electric guitars on it, so you are just naturally drawn to instruments that you could imagine lying in an abandoned house somewhere. And the same with the phonograph, you know, the wax cylinder player stuff that might have been left, that might still be usable,
I think that’s quite central to the whole thing, they’ve got through the winter, and it’s warm out and the landscape is coming back to life, and even though there’s a sense of this being an ending, for them, it’s in the context of new birth. So it is a hopeful sort of scenario somehow.
With the subject matter of climate change and the landscape of a post-climactic age, the trilogy could easily have become quite a brooding and intense experience for the listener. Jon’s skill as a songwriter and composer turns a potential sense of dread and despair on its head, with a message of cautious hope, optimism, and personal choice.
On the one hand, I was very keen not for it to be all doom and gloom, the whole trilogy, partly because, you know, if there is such thing as sort of artistic responsibility I wanted to contribute positively to this challenge. I think the sort of the approach that says, this is how horrendous it could be if we don’t sort ourselves out, that almost puts me off. It’s like The Road by Cormac McCarthy, it’s just too horrific. I just want to hideaway. I don’t want to have to deal with that. Whereas I like slightly more positive approaches that say, look, you know, if we actually sort our shit out in time, this could be great, we could actually get back a lot of stuff that we’ve lost in terms of community and in terms of understanding.
What it is that we actually need as humans? It’s not Netflix, and cars and foreign holidays, that’s what we feel we need, but actually what we really need is each other, and we need a community that we’re a part of, and that we feel valued by and feel that we are contributing to, and we need fun.
I always think of when you get power cuts, and then everyone goes, oh, I’ve got some candles somewhere and we’ve got guitar somewhere, why don’t you get that guitar and we’ll go and see if the neighbours are in and see if they want to come around and then within an hour, suddenly the whole city has transformed into this sort of model of communal living that would have been very familiar to our grandparents.
Then the lights come back on and people say, oh, that was brilliant, we should do that all the time. And of course, we never do, because the power is back on and Netflix is back on! So, we leave it until the next power cut. And I think that if you can present a possible future scenario that is like, the blackout party, you know, then that’s a much more positive thing to hold on to. It’s actually worth fighting for trying to deal with this, because it’s not just going to be miserable. At the end of the day.
The challenges of such an album is, of course, not to preach to the listener, something Jon was very cautious of. The album doesn’t present a definitive conclusion. The narrative is open to interpretation.
It’s been interesting getting into these last few albums writing on a more narrative level, because I was very keen, even though I knew I wanted a narrative structure, I was very keen not to be too specific about everything, because what I didn’t want to get into is pinning every little detail and the narrative down to there’s nothing for the listener to do, you know.
I think that’s actually the great freedom and strength of the album as an art form is, is that you can leave so much more space for the listener, than you can say, in a novel or a film. Because, firstly, you know, ideally you want people to listen to this, like fifty times, or whatever, whereas with a book it’s one read generally, so it’s a very different experience.
So, it’s more of a dialogue, and just because music without lyrics is this sort of abstract art form, so you need the lyrics there to pin stuff down a bit. But you don’t want the equivalent of footnotes.
The challenges of any musician at the moment is not only the opportunity to get together and play, but also how to record their work. Last Mile Home is, in most parts, an intimate record so in some ways the recording process was relatively straightforward but with guests such as Mary Hampton and the Remnant Strings this also required a bit of inventive planning.
Well, it was mostly just me sat in front of the microphone, so that was easy enough, and Andy Bell producing in the next room with a mask on. Mary Hampton was able to record herself at her home, so that was fine. With strings, we did have to gather in person, which we managed to do in the relatively unlocked bit of November before it all locked down again, so that was actually just really lovely to be in a room with other musicians, and particularly strings. Such a magical sound, three string players playing together. It was quite hard work, we had to get a lot done, but it was also quite magical for me just, you know, being in the room for that was great.
On musicians getting together, we couldn’t chat to Jon without discussing the exciting forthcoming return of Spiers and Boden and one of the highlights of lockdown 2020 the online reunion of the mighty Bellowhead for one evening only back in December.
The Bellowhead gig was great. Because we haven’t played together for four years, or whatever it was, that was exciting. But I think it actually was as much to do with the fact that none of us had been able to play music with anyone else for eight months, or whatever it was. So, to get to play with ten other people, with a nice PA so it all sounded great. Yeah, it was pretty good!
Anyone lucky enough to have seen Bellowhead live will know what a dynamic show the band deliver. Having watched the online gig myself what struck me was how much the band were enjoying the experience, it certainly looked as though everyone was having a blast.
We really were, we always did on stage. There were a few bits if you look carefully, I automatically go up to John to play a bit and then I’m like, oh, no, I’m not allowed to do that! So, we did work as we were marked out in our little squares, which fortunately doesn’t come out. But we were being quite careful to distance ourselves, but even so it was it was fantastic. Actually, just to be playing again. As you know Bellowhead don’t gig now, so if it hadn’t been for the pandemic, we wouldn’t have. Because of the pandemic, as it turned out, we were all available! So, the offer came in and we were able to do it and it was really good!
Whilst Bellowhead may not gig anymore, Spiers and Boden are very much looking to the future with plans to record and tour already in the pipeline since before Covid-19.
Well lockdown has been a bit of a bit awkward because we should be recording and rehearsing now, but we’re going to hopefully next month. We’ll have to see what the restrictions are. We’re on tour hopefully in the autumn, if things pan out positively, so that’ll be really nice to be back on the road.
Talking about touring, and returning to Last Mile Home, one of the challenges of any new release is the limitations of gigging in the current climate. Whilst hoping the album will tour soon, Jon is also exploring some exciting creative opportunities if lockdown continues.
I have got some gigs in the diary. I was supposed to be on tour this month, but some of those have been postponed to late spring, early summer, so I’m hoping those might happen. I’ve actually got some campfire gigs, which I don’t think have been announced yet, so I’m really looking forward to those.
We’re interested in trying some different things. Because the album’s all about walking, I thought maybe there might be some scope once outdoor stuff is a possibility. What’s been quite interesting with this pandemic is that you can actually get things done quite quickly in the entertainment industry when you need to. Pre-pandemic the idea of organising a gig for, you know, three weeks’ time or something was just ridiculous, you’d be talking numbers of eighteen months, surely, to plan a gig!
But at the moment it feels like you can sort something out pretty quickly, when you find out what the restrictions are for the next month. And also, it makes sense, because you don’t know what the restriction is going to be like in three months. So, it’s much better to say, right, next week gig here, so I’m hopeful that there’ll be a few gigs, and we might we’ll do some online stuff.
It kind of feels a bit, because the album’s all about nature, there’s something not quite right about me sitting staring at a computer screen, so I feel that we may need to be a bit more creative about how we present it.
The last track on the album is the beautifully poignant ‘Last Mile Home’. Not only does the track provide the album with its title, it coalesces the key themes and delivers a heart-breaking conclusion to what is a gorgeously heartfelt and atmospheric album.
Actually, I pinched the title from an old gospel song called ‘last mile home’, which came on a CD of old 1950s recordings of black gospel singers which I liked, and I just love the phrase.
It’s quite paradoxical, because they’re leaving, but they’re also there’s a sense of homecoming, there’s an idea that everyone has gone before them. So, there’s that, but there’s also a metaphorical thing. Is this the last journey of their life as well? It is paradoxical because there is hope and positivity in there as well. Essentially their aim is to get to the ocean, they haven’t really figured out what to do when they get to the ocean, or how they’re going to get across somehow. There’s a line in the song, ‘My home is in the ocean, or on the far side of the water’, so whatever happens it’s an ending, or it’s a new beginning.
Sometimes I think you’ve got to kind of embrace the paradox of a lyric. I do find lyrics present themselves sometimes. There was one on Songs from the Floodplain and I just came up with the chorus:
You see one flood and you’ve seen them all
They’re not all that they’re dressed up to be
They strut their feathers in the dust bowl parade
Then they line up in the has been cavalry
And it just arrived that lyric and I was like, I’m not quite sure what that means, but it sounds right. And then a few years later, I thought, oh, yeah, okay, the Has Been Cavalry. And it’s about the horsemen of the apocalypse, who it transpires have come to nothing, they’re like all these Spectres of Apocalypse. And then they all shamefacedly go and hang out in a cavalry yard. But I didn’t think of that as I wrote it. So, there are quite a lot of lyrics, I think on this album, where I’m still not quite sure what they mean, you know, but they feel right.
One activity that Jon has been tackling over the summer months, and which features on the new album in the sublime track ‘Cinnamon Water’, is the practice of wild swimming. Well explored in John Deakin’s beautiful book Waterlog, it’s an experience Jon is very much an enthusiast of.
Yeah, actually, I was determined to keep going through the winter. But I think the trick is, with the winters, you need to go regularly, so that you get gradually accustomed as it gets colder and colder. I was moving out of my recording unit, so I had three weeks where I didn’t get in the water, and then suddenly, the idea of jumping in a freezing cold reservoir seems not terribly appealing! So, I haven’t been since October, but yes, I was over the warmer months. The rivers here are this sort of peaty brown colour, so that’s where ‘Cinnamon Water’ came from.
There’s all sorts of levels to wild swimming. There is that sense of oneness with nature, there’s also I think, this chemical, biological thing about getting very cold and that the body actually responds very well to it, you know. Counter intuitively you would think it was a was a sort of bad thing to do your body, but it seems as if it is the case that the body, and particularly mental health, responds very well to it.
It’s the kind of thing that’s potentially really accessible for all of us. There are rivers everywhere and yet we don’t do it. At some point in the last fifty years, we’ve gone, the way you want to go swimming, what you want to do is you want to build a big breezeblock building, fill it with water that never gets changed, pump it full of chlorine, and, you know, urine from toddlers, and that’ll be perfect, let’s do that, great! And actually, wild swimming is very accessible, a simple thing that we’re not using as a resource for ourselves. Folk music would be another example of something that is just available for everyone and belongs to everyone and is not really being used. Maybe in a kind of simpler future, we’ll come to sort of value all that kind of stuff more.
Last Mile Home is out now on CD/LP/Digital now – http://smarturl.it/lastmilehome
For details of Jon’s upcoming shows, visit: https://www.jonboden.com/shows
Photo Credits: Tim James