the story
so far...

Ben Jones has spent most of his adult life behaving as though there might be a prize for writing the most songs, playing the most instruments and putting the greatest possible distance between himself and a conventional career. Born in Kent, England, and now firmly embedded in Austin, Texas, Jones is a songwriter, singer, multi-instrumentalist and producer whose musical compass has swung through British power-pop, folk, rock & roll, Americana and country without ever entirely settling on any of them. The common denominator is the song: melodies that sound suspiciously as though they’ve always existed, lyrics about recognisably human predicaments, and an incurable affection for records made when people still worried about Side Two.

Jones taught himself guitar as a teenager and spent the next decade and a half making records and touring independently around Britain. Among the more significant stops along the way was The Lovedays, the Kent band that gave his Beatles-and-Beatles-adjacent pop instincts somewhere to run wild. The group made hook-heavy records and toured both Britain and America before Jones found himself, as songwriters inconveniently do, with another pile of songs requiring somewhere to live. Two solo albums, Echobox and Kaleidoscope, followed, with Jones playing much of the material himself — less an artistic statement about isolation than the practical consequence of being able to play the bloody instruments.

Those records eventually demanded a stage incarnation, and Ben Jones & The Rifle Volunteers emerged from the remains of The Lovedays in 2011. Named after a Maidstone pub — because sometimes a band name requires neither a focus group nor a spiritual awakening — the Rifle Volunteers combined power-pop, rock & roll and the more eccentric corners of Jones’ record collection. It produced Shangri-La and its splendidly titled live counterpart Shangri-Live, recorded at The Barge on the Medway. It was the sort of setting in which Jones’ music made perfect sense: a band at full tilt, an audience within spilling distance of the musicians and considerably less concern for personal space than one generally encounters at the Royal Albert Hall.

Then America intervened.

In 2014, Jones headed across the Atlantic for what began as an extended run of shows and became something closer to a change of life. His musical partnership with Irish singer and bodhrán player Andrea Magee developed into Beat Root Revival, and the pair eventually made Austin home. Stripped initially to guitar, bodhrán, two voices and an alarming amount of energy, Beat Root Revival took the oldest possible ingredients — folk songs, blues, country, harmony and rhythm — and discovered that they still worked perfectly well if you hit them hard enough. The duo became road warriors, criss-crossing America and building audiences the old-fashioned way: one room, one support slot and one slightly overworked vehicle at a time.

That road put Jones and Magee in some fairly extraordinary company. Beat Root Revival toured with Brian Wilson, including dates connected with his Pet Sounds tour, and shared the road or stage with Brian Setzer, Jeff Bridges, The Fixx and Lake Street Dive, among others. There is something pleasingly improbable about a musician from Kent progressing from gigs around the Medway to playing American theatres with the man responsible for God Only Knows, but Jones’ career has rarely travelled in a straight line. Beat Root Revival subsequently signed with Surfdog Records and released UP in 2019, produced by Paul Leary of Butthole Surfers, widening the duo’s sound without sanding off its roots. Recognition from Austin’s musician-support organisation Black Fret — now Sonic Guild — followed, further rooting Jones in the city he’d adopted as home.

Meanwhile, the solo records never really stopped calling. In 2022 Jones released Souvenir, a sprawling return to the pleasures of making a record under his own name. It found him drawing freely from the various musical lives he’d accumulated by then — English pop craftsman, Texas songwriter, roots musician, arranger and inveterate record obsessive — with Bill Kirchen, the Telecaster titan forever associated with Commander Cody, and guitarist David Jimenez among the musicians adding their fingerprints. Souvenir feels less like somebody trying on genres than somebody who has finally stopped worrying about which shelf the record shop is going to put him on.

Jones has also quietly become the sort of songwriter other songwriters ring. His co-writing credits stretch through an impressive cross-section of the Texas and Austin songwriting community, with songs appearing on releases by Kelley Mickwee, Michael Hearne, Natalie Price, Shawnee Kilgore, Giulia Millanta and Pat Byrne. Mickwee’s Boomtown to Bust, for instance, contains songs written with Jones, while his broader collaborative work has increasingly made the point that his best instrument may not actually be the guitar, piano, bass, mandolin, ukulele, harmonica or drums. It may simply be knowing where a song ought to go next.

His forthcoming solo project, The Heartbreak Handbook, brings that instinct into particularly poignant focus. Conceived and made with Jones’ close friend and collaborator, the late Chris Gage, the record has inevitably acquired a meaning neither man could have anticipated when they began it. What started as two musicians making an album together now also stands as a document of friendship and collaboration — songs preserved from a conversation that cannot be resumed. For a writer who has always tried to make songs about recognisable experiences rather than disappear up the chimney of his own introspection, it is perhaps the most personal test yet of that philosophy.

And that philosophy matters. Jones has said that he tries to write about relatable things and avoid the self-indulgent; the hope is that somebody hearing one of his songs recognises something of their own life in it and feels a little less alone. That’s an unfashionably useful definition of songwriting, particularly in an age that encourages artists to turn themselves into brands before breakfast.

Austin audiences may also know Jones without necessarily having seen Ben Jones billed in enormous letters. Beyond Beat Root Revival, he’s become a familiar presence around the city’s stages — playing guitar, keyboards, singing, collaborating, producing and turning up wherever good songs are being committed. His appearances with the Pepperland Players reveal the pop scholar underneath the roots musician, while solo performances and collaborations around town expose just how broad the Jones songbook has become.

More than three decades after first picking up a guitar, Jones is therefore in the peculiar position of being both a veteran and, in some respects, only just arriving. He’s made records in England and Texas, fronted bands, built a transatlantic duo, opened for heroes, written for other artists, produced, arranged and accumulated enough instruments to make moving house an act of breathtaking stupidity. Yet the essential operation remains remarkably unchanged: sit down, find the chord, find the line, and follow the thing until it becomes a song.

The geography has changed considerably. The job hasn’t.