Mediaboss Marketing

You dont have to dig too deeply into Every Kingdom, the delicate debut from Ben Howard, to discover what floats this British minstrels boat.

The album cover photograph features the Devonshire-based lad, diving deep into the Mediterranean, near his parents coastal abode on Ibiza.

The gently-plucked album opener Old Pine, he says, is a song about my first surf trip away from home, when I went to France and nearly got killed by a pine tree.

Howard likes the ocean a lot, and Old Pine is one of the few places where his two passions songwriting and short-boarding overlap.

Surfing and music have always been two separate sides of my life. Im quite a fun-loving person most of the time, but I feel like I always get the serious side out when Im playing music, and then I have fun the rest of the time when I get in the sea, says Howard, who plans on hitting California beaches when he plays San Francisco this week.

English surfing, Howard says, is dramatically different: The ice-cold waters always require a wet suit, and the waves are choppier.

When he first discovered the sport at age 11, British surfing was limited to a hard-core group of enthusiasts. Now, there are more than half a million serious U.K. boarders.

So its nowhere near the California dream, he says. Its more like this funny little adventure we all go on, and its usually pissing down rain, and you may get a few waves. But its nice to just swim out and float about, really, he says. The surf scene actually launched this Donovan-influenced neo-folkie.

After playing several seaside concerts overseas, he says, I met Xavier Rudd at a surf festival in England. And he asked me if I wanted to go on tour with him the next time he came to Europe. So thats how it all started.

Soon, Mumford & Sons Ben Lovett had inked him to his new Communion imprint for Every Kingdom.

Read more:
Surfing, songs satiate Brit Ben Howard