Love and Real Love: On Keaton Henson

Keaton Henson is a musician and songwriter that has always been preoccupied with love and its failures. His first two albums (2010’s Dear and 2013’s Birthdays) were quintessential sad-singer-songwriter fare, where he found his falsetto voice as the narrator of broken relationships. ‘10am Gare du Nord’ from Birthdays sees Henson beg ‘Please do not hurt me love / I am a fragile one and you are the light in my eyes. / Please do not break my heart / I think it’s had enough pain to last the rest of my life.’ It’s melancholic and pathetic, but also utterly devastating.

When Henson came to the sadboy singer-songwriter genre, it had already found its apogee with Bon Iver’s For Emma, Forever Ago three years earlier, but Dear and Birthdays had something new — ugly and brutal honesty. The breakup narrative in For Emma… is sentimental, the singer Justin Vernon often presenting himself as the hurt victim he felt himself to be: ‘And now all your love is wasted / And then who the hell was I?’. It chronicles the kneejerk hurt of breakup pain — a howl of how could you do this to me? On the other hand, Keaton Henson was never afraid to blame himself or show his ugly side and, at times, its hard listening. ‘Teach me how to love you like I wrote / And say it like I mean it when I don’t’ is the opening line of Birthdays. Later in the album, on Lying to You Henson sings: ‘As we lie in bed I feel lonely / Though we’re young I feel eighty years old / With your arms around me keeping me warm / But baby, I’m still feeling cold’. The Henson in these tracks is a liar; he’s quick to express love without meaning and is willing to keep his partner in a loveless relationship to avoid being alone. Here Henson shows his key difference from the sadboy breakup albums of the early 2000s — he is not singing about love lost, but about why he is losing the love.

This carries forward into his instrumental work. One album of note is his soundtrack to Harry Macqueen’s 2020 film Supernova. The film follows Sam (Colin Firth) and Tusker (Stanley Tucci) who is losing his mental faculties to early onset dementia. One highlight of the soundtrack is Henson’s bittersweet rendition of Elgar’s ‘Salut d’Amour’ — a duet originally written for piano and violin that, in the film, is devastatingly played on just piano, alone.

Somnambulant Cycles plays in a similar space. A recent article in Far Out magazine wrote:

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.

Somanmbulant Cycles is not entirely wordless but it’s still an album that’s tellingly lacking in any kind of recognisably human presence. Through the whole album, vocals ring through only once on the track ‘Even’ but it’s only Henson repeating ‘Even if you go’ over and over again. The words are quickly devoid of meaning; a pleading kind of mantra that’s more important in its rhythm than its interpretation. Words become inhuman, feelings made meaningless but still, always, deeply familiar to anyone who’s felt love leave their life.

There comes a time in all failing relationships where the love itself is no longer there, but, as it leaves, it casts a long and familiar shadow over the ex-lovers. It’s safer to stay in this shadow than to admit any kind of a problem. Neither party wants to confront the absence of affection so, with breaking hearts, they sit in this shadow until it fades to nothing. Henson’s music is the perfect soundtrack to this gloaming of a relationship, where both parties feel the cold absence of a life-changing love that was there just a moment ago. This is what separates him from his contemporaries. He doesn’t write of the heartbreak of love lost, but of a far worse pain; love losing.

Here is where this piece was supposed to end. From notes made while listening to the album, my conclusion for most of the runtime was the above: Henson writes of the pain of love falling away. While such a conclusion is accurate for most of Henson’s previous work, the final track of Somnambulist Cycles complicates things. ‘And All At Once We Were Radiant’ opens on a quiet wind sample — the listener out in the cold — before a crashing muddle of reversed strings disorient. From this chaos, a melody. Tentative organs at first but quickly building, with the help of strings and keys, to a triumphant crest. It is day breaking over the restless sleepwalkers. A new day with all the possibilities and hope therein. In his book In Praise of Love Alain Badiou rejects the notion of love at first sight, which he calls ‘the exceptional moment of encounter’. He writes:

‘This is a radically Romantic interpretation that I think we need to challenge. It is artistically extremely beautiful but, in my opinion, it is existentially seriously lacking… it isn’t the ecstasy of those beginnings that is remarkable… Love is above all a construction that lasts… To give up at the first hurdle, the first serious disagreement, the first quarrel, is only to distort love. Real love is one that triumphs lastingly, sometimes painfully, over the hurdles erected by time, space and the world’ (pp. 31–32).

With the final track of Somnambulist Cycles, Henson presents us with a love that is being clawed back, worked on, built. Anyone that has been in love will be intimately familiar with the days or weeks of a serious disagreement. Henson’s sleepwalking metaphors are painfully apt. The world is colourless and dark, and it is impossible to conceive beyond the present moment. This is the space of Henson’s early break-up work, this empty feeling of lovelessness. It is with Somnambulist Cycles that he presents us with a love that lasts through that emptiness and, therefore, the first time that Henson has ever written of Real Love.