The caricature of the tortured artist, woebegone of gaze, wan and wispy of beard, has never felt more applicable than in the case of Keaton Henson. In a world bursting with distraction, his music has a beautifully hushed quality: it is an escape hatch from the tumult of everyday life.
Parader, his excellent ninth album, is a departure in that it is one of his more boisterous releases and is in part informed by his teenage love for grunge. But it’s all relative, and the LP isn’t exactly a headbanger’s delight as it opens with the descending cascading notes of Don’t I Just, which sounds like a Jeff Buckley ballad with the self-flagellation dialled all the way up (“Don’t I just blow the party out / like candles in a storm?”).
Notoriously wary of the spotlight, the London songwriter once tried to mediate his stage fright by having fans queue up so that he could serenade them on a one-to-one basis.
That strategy wouldn’t work with most performers. Imagine having to sit through the 2 Johnnies live, or Oasis’s cash-grab comeback, on your own. You’d choke on your bucket hat. But it was the perfect framing for Henson’s vulnerable acoustic pop, which brings the mumbled, introspective style of Nick Drake and Elliott Smith into the 21st century.
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His voice is a delicate croon – a whisper, really – forever on the brink of unravelling into a sob. It is the ideal delivery mechanism for music that shudders under an unbearable weight of melancholy. In that regard it’s an extension of Henson’s allergy to bright lights and bustle – a hypersensitivity that manifests most obviously when he’s giving one of his rare live performances but is also a challenge he must negotiate on a daily basis.
“The same thing affects me off stage. I don’t feel it’s specific to the stage,” he told The Irish Times in 2023. “It’s certainly the most heightened version of it. I just hate being looked at by lots of people.”
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He added that stage fright implies a lot of the fear has to do with making mistakes. “I’m not afraid of messing up or skipping a lyric. It’s the same thing that affects me when I drive to town. But it’s much worse, because there are five people in town and they’re busy doing other stuff. But there are 3,000 people in a venue and they’re not busy. They’re there specifically to watch me. That makes it really frightening.”
The grunge and indie influences are deployed judiciously. Insomnia combines a gorgeously chugging riff with a falsetto that suggests the moodier younger cousin of The Bends, by Radiohead, and culminates in an exquisitely understated chorus: “What has the daylight done for me but hurt my eyes?”
That knot of ennui intensifies on Furl, which has the glacial ache of Nine Inch Nails’ Hurt played at quarter-speed. Featuring backing vocals from Henson’s wife, Danielle Fricke, the song is both deeply distraught – he is yet again suffering through a crisis of confidence – and powered by a nervy exhilaration. Sob pop has never soared so high.
Contemporary singer-songwriters have come a long way from their angsty forebears. Hard though it is to imagine, for instance, the one-man pop machine Ed Sheeran started as an acolyte of Damien Rice. But Henson brings it back to the source with tunes such as the softly devastating Tourniquet, which you can imagine salving the woes of a packed Whelan’s in 2002.
He is excellent at drawing sketches of a quiet life lived without pretension. “I’ll let you know when I’m in town / we’ll spend the day hanging around,” he declares on Day in New York, a diaristic portrait of an afternoon spent idling and wondering about the meaning of it all.
That said, the lyrics occasionally tend towards woe-is-me self-parody: “I don’t want the drama of no one else / I’m happy on the shelf,” he observes on Past It, a tune so stereotypically grim it’s a wonder it doesn’t arrive with its own rain shower.
Paradoxically, the record’s standout moments come when Henson throws open the shutters and opens up to human interaction, as he does when duetting with the Chicago indie singer Julia Steiner on the gorgeously woozy Lazy Magician. It’s a reminder that even for an artist as diligent about their isolation as Keaton Henson is, a friend can make all the difference.
