Ben Walker’s new album ‘Banish Air From Air’ is released this month on 24th February and is currently a Featured Albums of the Month on Folk Radio. In his review, Glenn Kimpton described it as a beautifully realised project and opens by referring to Walker as “a deep-thinking and highly creative musician, unafraid to fuse styles and traditions to make adventurous music the rest of us wouldn’t get close to.”
In the guest post below, Ben Walker offers an insight into the making of the album and shares how pushing himself, “not just stylistically but in terms of what I do and don’t do creatively”, helped shape his vision.
Ben Walker: Why ‘Banish Air From Air’ took me into uncharted waters
It’s been a long three years making Banish Air from Air. I had plenty of time to think about it. I started writing for it long before Covid hit and was playing pieces like Starlings at gigs back in 2020. And then…it all went quiet for musicians, didn’t it? I ran to my guitar for safety, as ever, and made an instrumental EP – The Rakes of Adair – which was really just me missing the things I play at gigs.
I knew, though, at some point, I would want to make another album. I knew, too, that I wouldn’t want to make it an instrumental guitar album. With my first solo album Echo, I took trads and poems and tried to show people what was still true and relevant today, and I hope Banish has the same thought behind it. There’s something reassuring about the fact that writers through the ages have been trying to explain and understand the same things as we are. It felt at times like people were trying to control a world that was way beyond our wisdom. That’s a conversation that’s been going on for millennia.
David Bowie had some great advice for artists – he said you should ‘always go a little further into the water than you feel you’re capable of being in. Go a little out of your depth, and when you don’t feel that your feet are quite touching the bottom, you’re just about in the right place to do something exciting’. I think we can all fall into comfortable pockets very easily – guitarists stick to the same chord shapes because they’re familiar with them, songwriters default to the same subject matter, producers get lazy, because why change something that worked last time?
As ever, once I had the idea, it took a lot of reading and research to find the right direction to take it in, but one thing led to another. I started close to home. Kipling’s woods – he wrote Way through the Woods, not ten miles from my home – led to Teasdale’s Soft Rains and so on. This time, though, as well as working with other people’s words, I wanted to push myself, not just stylistically but in terms of what I do and don’t do creatively. I love old tunes but not old ground. I’d felt for a little while that with enough time and opportunity, I could make a reasonable fist of writing some words of my own around the stuff I was reading, but I’d never felt able to say anything about it to anyone, nor had I ever had the time to properly try. Suddenly, I had time. It felt good to be trying something I hadn’t tried before. Although there are three original songs on the album (Yews of Borrowdale, Eggshells, Kepler and Sol), there are twenty that I finished and several more that got started and left by the wayside.
It’s been gratifying to see that, for the most part, people see what I’ve been trying to do with this album stylistically. That wasn’t certain by any means. I wasn’t sure what people would make of it. I love traditional music, but by the same token, I love chamber music, instrumental guitar, electronica, rock and so on and so on. There’s nothing wrong with painting in only one colour, but if you have an entire sonic palette to draw upon, why wouldn’t you? The risk of casting your net wide is that you end up with something that’s a bit all over the place; it’s even more of a risk, of course, if you’re quite literally not singing with one voice. I thought it was a risk worth taking and hoped that there was enough of a uniting idea – this dialogue between humankind and nature – behind the album to hold it all together.
It’s never really been about me; I’m just one person and not even a particularly interesting one. For me, the joy comes from the idea and the song, and the musical puzzle of how to find the right style and the singer for it, how to make it feel like it could fit in today’s world. Once I have someone in my mind for the song, their way of singing becomes part of developing the arrangement. King Storm, for example, is a trad from the Bodleian. It took a really long time to work out what I wanted to do with it. For a year or so, it was a 70s blues-rock number: I had all the parts there, drums fully recorded, but something about it felt wrong. Rather than throw it all away, I decided to keep the topline, and sample the drums in much the same way that (say) an artist might sample a Led Zeppelin drum break, and get Lucy Alexander to sing it – that changed the mood completely and kicked it forward twenty years, giving it that 90s Bristol feel. Still very English, and as far from us now as Fairport was from then.
Is it all a step too far? Who knows. You could argue it’s not far enough. I’ll always love a trad, and I’ll always love my guitar, but I think the last thing folk music needs is to be encased in formaldehyde. Cecil Sharp might disagree, but I think that the folk music of future generations is being made in a high-rise somewhere as we speak – or at least I very much hope it is. It might not sound like the folk music of the past, but the nice thing about folk music is it’s there to take and mould and change. It’s not sacred, it’s human. It didn’t spring up fully formed from the earth, and it doesn’t want to be kept safe in a museum. It’s music for and about folk and the big and little things we’ve always thought about.
Banish Air From Air is out on 24th February via Folkroom Records.
Order via Bandcamp | Rough Trade | Resident
https://www.benwalkermusic.com/