British singer-songwriter Frank Turner was always planning to mix things up for his follow-up project to a pair of acclaimed albums that pegged him as a broken-hearted troubadour. What he didn’t know was that the turmoil of 2016 around the world would force him to change the change-up on the fly.
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Turner had begun writing an album of songs inspired by forgotten women in history. He still plans to finish that up, but events such as the Brexit vote and the contentious American presidential election made it clear he had other things he needed to get off his chest. “These are tumultuous world historical events,” Turner told American Songwriter. “And they started tweaking my writing mode. Suddenly I felt very inspired to write about stuff and it felt like that had to come first.”
What emerged was Be More Kind, an album that both addresses the topics of the day and makes an overarching, heartfelt plea for unity. Turner insists that the change in subject matter shouldn’t surprise those who have been paying close attention. “Music fans sometimes have a bit of a goldfish memory,” he laughs. “I wrote my fourth album about England (2011’s England Keep My Bones.) And then when my fifth album came out and it didn’t have any song about England on it, it was like, ‘It’s a radical departure.’ You know, it’s one record, dude.”
Turner, having embarked upon a happy romance, found himself with less need to look inward, and, the times being what they were, he couldn’t help but look outward. Yet he didn’t want to only write songs that were laundry lists of social and political issues, citing what he calls “The Phil Ochs Paradox.”
“If you look at the 1960s in the Civil Rights era, you’ve got Bob Dylan and Phil Ochs, both writing songs,” he explains. “And everybody remembers Dylan and not many remember Phil Ochs. The reason for that is that Phil Ochs’ songs were way too contextually specific. He wrote songs about what was happening at that time. And Dylan, whether through craftiness or whether through artistic inspiration, wrote songs that had much more of a timelessness to them. In 2018, you can listen to ‘The Times They Are A-Changin’ and it’s just as relevant as it ever was.”
To achieve this, Turner mixed up the medicine. For every fast-talking rant, like “1933” and “21st Century Survival Blues” on the album, there are also songs like “The Lifeboat,” filled with wistful metaphors, or “Little Changes,” with its bounding optimism, that balance them out.
He also decided early on in the process that the album would not be full of acoustic dirges, citing instead the post-punk of the ’80s as an inspiration on the album’s bright, hooky sound. “It struck me that, if I have a message that I wish to share and deliver with these songs, in a way the most subversive thing to do was to make a pop album,” Turner says.
The song that will likely turn the most heads, based on its title alone, is “Make America Great Again,” which turns the slogan on its ear. “My aspiration for that song is that even people who I disagree with politically will at least give it the due attention that it’s not an anti-American song,” Turner says of his intent. “Since I first came to America in the mid-2000s, I fell in love with it instantly. What I find distressing about this populist movement is that it seems to have misidentified what’s great about America. The song mentions Ellis Island, but there were so many other things I could have mentioned, these incredible gestures of nobility and generosity on the part of the country. I wish there was a movement in America to celebrate those things. I would be so on board with it.”
In sharp contrast to that is the gorgeous title track, which was partly inspired by lines from the British poet Clive James. It’s a song that stands out for the simple wisdom of its message. “In a way, it’s easier to bury yourself in complex imagery and vocabulary,” he says. “Writing something like ‘Lean On Me’ by Bill Withers is not only much braver, but it’s also much harder. To say something bold and simple takes more courage and more skill. Whether or not I have that skill is not really for me to say, but certainly that has been a theme in the last decade of my musical life.”
Turner doesn’t claim to have the answers. “I claim zero moral, political high ground about anything,” he says. But he hopes the message that people listening to Be More Kind might take away is that the nature of your argument isn’t nearly as important as the way you conduct it. “The young and the angry, myself included, can be reminded that, when all the dust is settled, nobody is going to remember the vagaries of the specific issues you were arguing about 20 years from now,” he says. “But they’ll remember whether you treated the people around you with decency.”
