Ben Howard doesn’t mind if his songs don’t make perfect sense together. In fact, he kind of prefers it. His latest album, Collections from the Whiteout, is less a meticulously crafted narrative and more a patchwork of sonic postcards, scribbled down during a year and a half spent drifting between Paris, Ibiza, New York, and whatever strange corners of his mind were left unexplored.
“It’s just a word, really,” he shrugs when asked about the title. The ‘whiteout’ isn’t some grand metaphor. It’s a vibe. “You can look out on your snowy window, and that’s a whiteout. But I just liked it. It felt right at the time.”
That’s Ben Howard in a sentence. He’s allergic to over-explaining. When asked about the tragic real-life inspirations behind songs like “Crowhurst’s Meme” and “The Strange Last Flight of Richard Russell”—both men who died by suicide in self-imposed isolation, one in a boat, the other in a stolen plane—he doesn’t launch into a TED Talk on existentialism. “I’m not really taking on characters,” he says. “It’s more just little passing feelings.”
This isn’t Howard going full Springsteen, penning ballads to the working man. It’s more like he’s scrolling through Wikipedia at 2 a.m., stumbling on something sad, and thinking, “Yeah, that’ll do.” And yet, somehow, it works.
The album itself is a wonky, beautiful mess of sounds you probably didn’t expect from him—unless you expected him to team up with Aaron Dessner of The National, in which case, this all tracks. “It was pretty effortless,” he says of the collaboration. “We just had a good time making noises.” He credits Dessner for finally letting him go full weird with delayed guitar parts and off-kilter grooves. Case in point: “Sage That She Was Burning,” a track in 7/8 that Howard admits he can’t even count. “I don’t think I’ve ever played a guitar part in 7/8,” he laughs. “I can’t even tell you that part. I just know it sounds different.”
And different is the point. “I’m always trying to keep my ears and eyes open to places,” he says of his nomadic recording style. “Changing location is the easiest way to stay on your toes.” From Ibiza’s pirate history to Parisian fragments, the cities left their marks, even if you can’t hear them in the chords.
There’s no master plan here. The album is called Collections for a reason. “It gave me an excuse to put a load of songs together that maybe didn’t fit,” he admits. But what seemed scattershot in theory ends up flowing with a strange cohesion, like flipping through someone else’s dream journal.
Even the moments of lightness come with a wink. The video for “What A Day” pulls from the nonsense rhyme “Two Dead Boys,” which Howard says is just part of England’s literary detritus. “It just seemed like a fun idea for a video,” he says, brushing off any attempt to dig deeper.
Still, you get the sense he’s more aware than he lets on. Talking about how the world inevitably seeps into his writing, he concedes, “We’re all fabrications, really. It’s hard to keep yourself away from the exterior world and not let it influence you entirely.”
So no, he didn’t set out to write a pandemic album. But the isolation, the oddball characters, the sense of being slightly adrift—they all feel a little too on the nose to be pure coincidence.
Whatever the intent, Collections from the Whiteout lands as one of Howard’s most adventurous records yet, a collection that doesn’t worry about fitting together because it’s too busy sounding like no one else. “It’s just a good word,” he says again, and somehow, that’s enough.
Watch the interview above and then check out videos below.
