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Ben Howard

$29.50—$39.50 advance

Band Details

From the Promoter

The winner of two 2013 Brit Awards, Ben Howard returns to Toronto after selling out the Sound Academy this past September.

Life on the road with his band, childhood friend India Bourne on cello and Chris Bond on bass and drum, has created a close knit unit and given them all a heightened “awareness of sound.” You can hear it in the gentle, note perfect harmonies and the fragility in which they are delivered. The band hushes rooms, scatters the audience with a sense of euphoria, and leaves them desperate for much more of the same. “I think people can hear that when the band and I play, we really mean it. I have always written songs that draw on my own emotions, and I don’t want to try and hide any of it. I guess everyone relates to raw emotion,” notes Howard.

A young acoustic troubadour, Howard will make you feel as though he is the first young acoustic troubadour you have ever heard. He brings freshness to the form, gives it luster, making it all seem brand new, even though his songs have a quality of wisdom and a rootsy authenticity as old as the hills. He is something of an acoustic guitar whiz, having mastered the art of strumming, plucking and hammering the instrument for rhythmic purpose.

Howard grew up in Devon, a county in the South West of England and surrounded himself with the richly textured music in his parent’s record collection. “Van Morrison, John Martyn, Nick Drake, Richie Havens, Joni Mitchell, Simon and Garfunkel,” he says. “That’s what we’d listen to in the house and in the car wherever we were going.” It was
these records that encouraged him to pick up a guitar, re-stringing his mother’s Spanish nylon acoustic at the age of eight. Howard’s organic success was initially marked by the core European surf scene, who had quickly taken him under their wing and were fiercely passionate about promoting him. Big name surf brands signed on to support the emerging artist, and just as Howard contemplated doing the whole thing alone, in came Island Records, U.K. Long before the hustle and bustle of press teams and radio pluggers, marketing campaigns and BBC sessions, Howard was filling the van with mates and tapes and making himself a living on his own terms. Every Kingdom was recorded in the family countryside barn of cellist India Bourne and is produced by drummer, Chris Bond. “Nobody knows the music like we do. Chris is brilliant at capturing a mood and an atmosphere so we kept close to what we know so
well. I am really proud that we did,” muses Howard.

Promoter

Live Nationlivenation.com