Back in March, Jon Boden released Last Mile Home (reviewed here by Billy Rough), the final part of his post-climate change trilogy originating in 2009’s Songs from the Floodplains, followed by 2017’s Afterglow. To mark its release, Jon performed a series of tour dates that continue over the summer holidays, including some new dates just added for Derby and Coventry (details below).
In addition, on Tuesday 21st December 2021, Eliza Carthy and Jon Boden will combine their considerable talents for the first time performing as a duo and coming together for a wassail at London’s iconic Union Chapel (tickets). Presenting seasonal, traditional material on a stage decorated for the occasion, they will take the audience back to some of the oldest songs in the English canon, telling Christmas tales, spreading good cheer and lighting up one of the darkest days of the year, ahead of Christmas Day itself.
Jon is also running a 5-day Knoydart Songwriting Retreat in September, which we wrote about here…and, don’t forget that Spiers and Boden are back together again and touring in September/October, which we shared the news of here.
Jon was our Artist of the Month in March when Last Mile Home was released, an album whose ‘acoustic and spiritual sound’ contrasted well with the two previous releases, reflecting the album’s story is of an older couple leaving their home on the edge of Sheffield to walk, through a post-climactic landscape, the eighty miles to the North Sea coast in the aim of finding a new home.
In his review, Billy concluded: The musicianship on display across this forty-five-minute journey is fault-free throughout and shifts seamlessly from orchestral dazzlements to restrained acoustic partnerships that lightly brush the vocal and create a chambered atmosphere. It is a full, large scale and grand piece of work that is as intelligent as it is entertaining, and it confirms Jon Boden as one of the most interesting and exciting British singers and arrangers currently working.
He followed up his review with an in-depth interview here, in which he asked about the more traditional sounds and how the album, set in spring/summer, offers a sense of optimism and rebirth:
“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.”
Jon also provided an interesting insight into the album’s title track, Last Mile Home:
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.
Last Mile Home is out now on CD/LP/Digital now – http://smarturl.it/lastmilehome
Jon Boden Tour Dates
Thurs 29th July – Windmill Hill City Farm, Bristol * Tickets
Fri 30th July – Spitalfields City Farm, London* (LATE SHOW SOLD OUT)
Sun 1st Aug – The Promised Land, Sheffield* Tickets
Wed 18th Aug – St Edith Folk, Cranbrook (Kent) Tickets
Thurs 19th Aug – Temperance Bar, Leamington Spa (SOLD OUT)
Fri 20th Aug – The Market Place Marquee, Derby Tickets
Mon 30th Aug – Jon Boden & The Remnant Strings – Assembly Festival Garden, Coventry (NEW GIG) Tickets
Fri 10th Sep – Swanage Folk Festival Tickets
13th-17th September – Knoydart Songwriting Retreat Info & Booking
Tue 21st Dec – Eliza Carthy & Jon Boden’s “The Wassail” Union Chapel, London Tickets
*matinee and evening performances
Photo Credit: Tim James