Only Love

"Only Love" is the closest Ben Howard comes to a hymn. The song has a reverence to it — not religious exactly, but devotional in the older sense, the kind of love-as-spiritual-practice that runs through folk tradition from Appalachian ballads to English pastoral song. Howard's guitar playing is at its most expansive here, open tunings ringing out with a cathedral spaciousness, chords allowed to sustain and breathe before the next arrives. His vocal delivery is unusually controlled for this period of his work, less raw than elsewhere, almost careful — as though he's trying to get something exactly right, to honor its weight. The song builds in waves, dynamics rising and retreating with the patience of tidal movement, and when the full arrangement fills in — bass, percussion, backing vocals — it feels earned rather than imposed. At its core, the lyric makes a simple argument: that love, stripped of everything else, is sufficient. Not romantically naive but philosophically committed, the way you commit to a belief that has cost you something. Culturally it helped define a moment when stripped-back folk was reclaiming emotional sincerity from the irony-saturated mainstream — a song that meant what it said, entirely. Reach for it when you need to remember what matters, or when you want music that takes the feeling seriously rather than making it pretty.