Life By Misadventure

Two weeks into the original recording schedule for Rag’n’Bone Man’s second album, exasperation had set in. “We were at the point of breaking,” the singer-songwriter born Rory Graham tells Apple Music. When Graham, keyboardist Ben Jackson-Cook and bassist Bill Banwell arrived in Nashville in spring 2020, it was just as the pandemic struck. Forced to quarantine in their rented house for a fortnight, the trio marinated in frustration. “The studio was 20 yards away, locked up,” he says. “It just felt like someone was teasing us.” To make the best of it, they spent their days rehearsing the songs. That experience emboldened Graham’s belief that Life by Misadventure should be recorded in a band set-up with a live feel—to distinguish it from the homogeneous, overproduced pop sound he felt he was hearing on the radio. Graham and Jackson-Cook had previously visited Nashville to collaborate with local songwriters, including Mike Reid and Allen Shamblin, plus The Highwomen’s Natalie Hemby. “Everything just feels calm and considered,” Graham says about writing sessions that occurred outside of studios, around kitchen tables with just guitars and pads and pens, “and all about servicing the song, not about trying to fix that radio hit.” The trip helped the three-time BRIT winner realise his vision for a more adventurous Rag’n’Bone Man sound, adding folk, jazz, New Wave and funk to the blues-and-soul tones of his 2017 debut Human. Finally allowed into the studio, they nailed 13 well-practised songs in six days, assisted by players including The Revolution’s Wendy Melvoin and Grammy-winning drummer Daru Jones. Inside these tracks, you’ll find Graham’s candid reflections on the past, present and future. “I was thinking a lot about my younger self,” he says, “and also about right now—being a father, and responsibility and morality. And then, ‘Oh, shit, I’ve brought a child into this world, and it’s a really scary future.’” Here, Rags guides us through the album, track by track. “F