The Safe Haven of Wordlessness: Keaton Henson on the emotional privacy of his instrumental works
“The more time you spend in the mine of yourself, the more of your life you lose. The longer you spend digging around for sadness to use, the more good days like this you miss out on, when you’re sat in the garden, and everything is nice,” Keaton Henson says, waving one arm out into the sunny day that surrounds us.
If anything, we’ve been putting off this conversation all day. As we arrived at Henson’s remote country home, after a train ride and a drive through some winding country roads, we then decided to hike up a hill. For an hour or so, Henson, our photographer and I all idly chat between heaving breaths on a steep incline. Our photographer snaps some photos while we talk about the merits of living outside of a city, our summer plans, and Henson’s attempts to integrate into the goings-on of small-town country life, complete with art competitions where his own professional entries win him the humble prize of 30p. It takes us hours to eventually settle at the bottom of the garden and hit record. But as we’re here to talk about his new album, Somnambulant Cycles, that feels incredibly apt.
Somnambulant is defined as “resembling or characteristic of a sleepwalker”. To Henson, his definition is “a sense of physiologically fertile calm, the calm where ideas come from, where emotions are felt but pass by like pedestrians.” Much like the music videos he’s released that are of long, still shots, the album is intended to provide moments of stationary thought and feeling. He’s inviting you to be nothing but there and present, which is how it feels in his garden.
But to make sense of the album, the conversation needed to start a year ago as Henson released his seventh record, House Party. Anyone who’s been a fan of the artist for a long time noticed something very different about that one. For one album cycle, the musician was suddenly present and active where he is usually, famously reclusive. “I fully committed,” he explains, “I wanted to see what my life would be like and an album release would be like if I could be that artist.” By ‘that’ artist, he means an ordinary modern musician as he starred in upbeat music videos, planned a tour, and dabbled in social media. But all these things are alien to the man who has, for the majority of his career, been distant and mysterious. “I really enjoyed seeing the other side of what being an artist is,” he admits with fond feelings towards the album, “but it was exhausting.”
House Party was Henson playing with extroversion. In response, Somnambulant Cycles is introversion at its furthest: an instrumental record devoid of his voice or face.
This is a pattern Henson’s fans know well. After 2016’s emotive Kindly Now, he worked on the instrumental Six Lethargies. Following the success of his lyrically heavy first two records, he rebelled with his first classical effort, Romantic Works, in 2014. “Romantic Works was a direct response to the stress of being the face and the voice of Birthdays,” he explains. “It was a response to how uncomfortable notoriety or like ‘the scene’ made me at a time when I’d started to gain more attention, and major labels had begun discussing how I needed to be more accessible and wanting honest lyrics but not in a way that might make people uncomfortable.” he continues.
But, like all artists, Henson had to create something. “It was my desire to get away from that, but I still needed to make music.”
To Henson, these returns to instrumental music feel like a moment of privacy from the gut-wrenching, incredibly emotive and devastating lyricism he’s probably best known for. In many ways, putting the pen down provides a much-needed mental health break, which is something he’s matured into realising. “There are only so many feelings you can give before it becomes destructive,” he says. “There’s a quote I read about how when you’ve mined yourself for emotion or created something quite guttural, you only have two choices. You either come up and exist on the surface for a bit, or you end up having to keep digging.”
To him, an album like this is the surface, and the switch from singer-songwriter to composer is him putting the shovel down. “Switching it up stops me from depleting that mine,” he says, meaning it both in an artistic way and in a responsible, human way, “It gives me longevity like there’s still some stuff in here, but I’m not wasting away in that pit of myself.”
Instead, an album like Somnambulant Cycles is less of a mine and more of a building to be built brick by brick from the foundations. “My songs really do just like fall out and you’re trying to just catch them when they do” he says of his lyrical works, but this process is the total opposite. “With the instrumental stuff, it’s slower. You do a first pass, knowing you’ll chip away at it later. The initial idea will still just appear, but then i’ll stay focused in on it and try things and move bits around and try it with different instruments,” he explains. In many ways, the very process of making an album like this demands exactly what the record hopes to convey: a sense of stillness and focus on the present as Henson switches gears from sharp, short lyrical emotion into an enduring task in which he’ll stay at work for a while.
But that isn’t to say that the record is devoid of emotion. Somehow, despite being unrecognisable from the guitar-led tracks that define the rest of his discography, Henson’s classical and instrumental efforts still feel coloured with the same rich feeling. “I’m still letting emotion guide, but it’s about resonance,” he says. “I guess quite literally I’m looking for the right resonance, the right vibration that summarises whatever feeling or moment I’m trying to convey. Then, when I catch that, I follow it.” The result is an album of emotional vignettes that Henson sees as distinct scenes, “There are songs where I wanted them to sound like the moment of being stood on a balcony while a city is asleep, or moments at night when you’re going home. Those in-between moments where you get that feeling of transitioning.”
However, Henson mostly wants his listeners to paint their own picture. “I can see the thing that I was trying to describe, but that doesn’t mean I want other people to necessarily see it too,” he says as if keeping his listeners out of his space by inviting them to image their own. That alone reveals itself as another safe haven found in lyric-less works. “That’s something I really love about making this music,” he admits. “Yes, it’s personal to me, but that doesn’t mean I’m bearing anything. I’m being emotionally vulnerable, but I don’t feel exposed.”
It’s fascinating, this flipping of the coin that Henson has done over and over through his discography, moving between sharp lyrical storytelling to a stark sparsity. “I like the challenge of it. Sometimes, when I’ve been writing a lot, I like to wonder if I could say exactly that without any words,” he says. It’s all as if Somnambulant Cycles is like any other Keaton Henson album, but written in invisible ink for a moment where all his thoughts can be his, but the feelings can still be ours.
Now to honour that wordless peace, enjoy a walk in the country with Keaton Henson, photographed by Ele Marchant…
