When he suffered two mini-strokes last year, the singer-songwriter felt like ‘the world was pouring in’. But the experience has fuelled his most fluid, experimental album yet
Lazing in his Ibiza garden one afternoon last spring, Ben Howard experienced what he calls “a strange interlude”. Without warning, for an hour, the Brit award-winning singer-songwriter completely lost his ability to speak.
“All my other senses became really heightened,” he says, via video call from the dressing room of the Coliseu do Porto, where he’s playing later. “It was an overload of information, like the whole world was pouring in at once. I felt really hypersensitive to everything: the light, and the sound of the trees, and the leaves, and the wind … I was still compos mentis, but I didn’t have the words to explain it. It was over in an hour. And then, a month later, it happened again.”
