It must be tempting for an artist to sell sadness. To package and market a product that everyone needs is (if not good morality) good business sense, and everyone's got an emptiness inside of them waiting to be filled. Into this ready-made empty space we the listeners - consumers first and foremost - pour sad songs, and sad poetry, and sad art. All of it fits, but all of it fades quick. So it's only natural that we should demand more of these sad songs, sad pictures, sad poems if they're at least helping us feel something. It's an artist's good luck that they should need to produce more and be compensated for it. Simple supply and demand.
Maybe that's why we're so readily cynical toward Keaton Henson and artists like him - artists who distill all the difficulties that come with being a person into easy, four minute bytes. We're frustrated at our own predisposition towards sadness. We're frustrated that there are people willing to take advantage of that predisposition so as to hawk their kitschy love poems. We’re frustrated that all of these love poems are, without fail, set to D minor.
But it's impossible to imagine Keaton Henson a business man. A folk musician turned poet turned visual artist turned folk musician again, Henson's general aura is something more reservedly whimsical - Wes Anderson, if Wes Anderson were sort of a bummer at parties; a caricature of Henry David Thoreau if the author had sequestered himself away not in the woods but in a small apartment wedged somewhere in the greys of south London.
Maybe it's the beard.
Or maybe it's Henson's tinny, aching vibrato (present on nearly every one of his tracks) that recalls a certain one-room-one-man brand of loneliness. Thoreau's cabin.
The Wes Anderson connection, though? That'd probably be the puppets. They're front-and-center in a few of Henson's videos, and they're ratty enough to match whatever melancholic sounds he's strung together.
In the video for his brooding single “Charon”, the songwriter himself gets the muppet treatment. And it’s morbid. In just over four minutes, every conceivable death befalls Henson’s puppet avatar. Stabbing, hanging, a toaster tossed in the bathtub, “Charon” is an ode to death and weakness, and the music video is made effective by the sharp contrast between on-screen suicide and something so childish/wholesome as a puppet. We’re affected. Henson’s found a formula that works.
[From "Charon"]
It's interesting, then, that the focus of the video for "Earnestly Yours" isn’t puppetry, but the human body. (“Earnestly” is a track off Romantic Works, an instrumental album featuring Henson on piano, accompanied by cellist Ren Ford. Henson’s distinctive words and voice are noticeably absent throughout.)
Immediately personal, the video opens with a black-and-white title card: the names of the track and artist scratched out in Henson's own handwriting. This is a hallmark of all Keaton Henson videos and, indeed, all content produced by him. It's less elegant than an artist's signature, more it's a child carving his initials into a tree trunk, or that same child grown up and chipping at the paint of a bathroom stall: marking territory. The song belongs to the Henson, we're just being allowed to hear it.
This might feel pretentious if Henson wasn't so quick to explain the motivation behind making his music so (seemingly) exclusive.
"The listeners aren't really thinking about my heartache, or my long walks," said Henson in an interview with The Guardian. "Music is entirely subjective, and we don't listen to an artist to feel sorry for them, we listen to feel sorry for ourselves."
It’s an honest soundbite, part observation, part admission. Henson isn't pretending to appeal to some universal sadness in all of us. He's presenting us with his sadness and allowing us to process it through our own lenses.
And, as the video continues, our lenses capture this: flash-images of different, pale models, the camera tight on individual body parts. In one scene, there's the curve of a rib cage, horizontal as if its owner were lying in bed. Then a quick cut to an elbow. Then clasped fingers. Then the place where the hairline curves to avoid the ear. All carefully framed against a black backdrop.
There's a natural, human undulation to all of this - like breathing. Paired with the simple, ascending scale of the piano, we're lulled into a false sense of restfulness.
Soon, though, the scales come faster and Ford digs into his accompaniment - the cello is as dark as the set. As the tempo escalates, the faceless models begin to rub and pick at their skin. It's infectious, with the rubbing escalating to kneading, and the kneading to clawing, and soon the listener's chest heaves in time with the chest on screen.
[From "Earnestly Yours"]
When it finally comes, the song’s return to its original tempo doesn’t feel like a return to calm. Instead, we’re left with the knowledge that the bodies in question were never at rest. They existed and continue to exist in a constant state of panic, and worry, and all the things that prompt self-destructive picking at flesh. We just couldn’t tell. Anxiety doesn’t always make a scene of itself.
Last year the Chicago Museum of Modern Art opened a small collection on corporeality, art, and the connection between the two. One of the pieces in that collection,‘Identity Transfer’, stood alone near the back of the museum - intriguingly spare.‘Transfer’ consisted of an old box TV and the film playing on it: a two minute, looped recording of the artist pressing his own thumbnail into his fingertip. This action leaves a crescent-shaped mark that mutilates the artist’s fingerprint for a moment, before quickly fading away. With this piece, the artist implies that the physical form cannot exist in a vacuum, that the body is always changing, always being acted upon by some force, and that the body must always bear a visible mark of that force.
Henson, who recently put on a small art exhibition of his own and has made a few successful forays into the world of graphic design, presents a similar artistic statement in “Earnestly Yours”. The video identifies anxiety as one of those ‘constant forces’ acting upon our bodies, always pressing, always marking. However, instead of a single fingertip dented by a thumbnail, here we have whole swaths of skin rubbed raw.
Henson isn’t shy about his afflictions, at least not when he’s got a guitar to hide behind. He’s depressed, anxious; crippling stage fright prevents him from giving live performances and - in his own words - from holding a decent conversation. His debut album, Dear, was written and recorded from the safety of his bedroom and, until prompted by a friend, Henson had no intention of sharing his music with the public.
What he has decided to share is troubling and genuine.
"Earnestly Yours," Henson assures us. It’s a sentiment shared by his vast collection of songs, videos, poetry, sketch work, and graphic installations. Earnestness is the presence of real emotion and, in a music market saturated by commercialized sadness, that this music feels real is no small feat.
