The renowned singer-songwriter has released his second track of 2021 titled ‘Crowhurst’s Meme’. Ben Howard, who shot to fame in 2011 with his debut album, ‘Every Kingdom’, has announced that the new single is off his upcoming fourth album ‘Collections From The Whiteout’, set to be released 26th March 2021 by Island Records.
Howard stated that the new offering is based off a famous story of a sailor who died whilst attempting to sail around the ocean alone. He said, ‘This song was firstly inspired by a wonky synth guitar part that I had which had a kind of seasick quality to it, which in my head had a tenuous link to the Donald Crowhurst story – the famous tale of the amateur British sailor who died whilst sailing around the world. These two things seemed to marry and so it became a sort of exploration of the undocumented universal side of the story.’
The track itself is different from Howard’s previous releases, including ‘What a Day’ that dropped in January 2021. Whilst his calming vocals are as distinguishable as ever, the ‘wonky synth guitar part’, off-beat drums and bass give an overall feeling of the track being slightly sinister and hauntingly poetic. Howard sings ‘When I wake up / I’m a long way out’ repetitively for the chorus, detailing back to the link between having a ‘seasick quality’ and the tragic sea story of Crowhurst.
The British Businessman, Donald Crowhurst, competed in The Sunday Times Golden Globe Race in 1968. From the beginning of the race, Crowhurst had reportedly given false claims of his position and ambiguous radio reports, with 3 months silence between January to April 1969. His log book was found adrift, which was examined and showed Crowhurst to be suffering from paranoia and psychotic disorder. Due to his false reports, there was a high chance of him winning the prize of being the fastest sailor meaning the world was watching him and cheering him on. Many researchers believed this to be the sailors downfall, that the fraudulence had caught up with him and his mental stability. Yachting World stated about the voyage, ‘For, as anyone who has sailed out of sight of land knows, the sea has a knack of bringing out our inner demons. There is a Crowhurst in us all.’ To learn more, Nicholas Tomalin and Ron Hall wrote a biography on this voyage which can be bought here.
The lyricism of Howard’s track depict this tragic story of Crowhurst’s demise. Lyrics such as ‘found a radio silence’, and perhaps the most obvious, ‘And they’ll murder me/ If I come back winning / Yeah they’ll murder me’, could depict the sailors tale, how if his deception was revealed his reputation and more would be lost. In an Instagram post, Howard shared a picture of the Teignmouth Electron, the boat that Crowhurst sailed in.
The track will feature on Howard’s new album, which is said to be his “most fully realised to date”.
