Songs of things above

You won’t see the title of singer-­songwriter Ben English’s debut album on its cover. You won’t even see English’s name. What you will see is a sepia-tinted close-up of his face as he stares earnestly into the camera.

And his music is every bit as uncluttered.

“I recorded all the songs in the same day,” the soft-spoken 21-year-old accounting-and-finance major told me from his family’s home in Waterford, Ireland. “I just recorded it on my laptop, put a bit of reverb on it, and left it at that.”

English titled the results Seasons on the Straight & Narrow, and you can stream all 38 minutes on Spotify or “name your price” and purchase a digital download on Bandcamp.

Whatever you spend will be a wise investment, especially if you crave the sound of a single hushed voice, a gently picked Martin 00-15M guitar, and meditatively intoned refrains such as “There is power in the name of the Lord,” “I want to love You with all my heart and soul and mind,” and “Let’s go down to the water and wash our sins away.”

It’s a sound that in its verbal and musical simplicity has the capacity to set listeners’ minds on things above like nothing so much as John Michael Talbot’s 1980 classic Come to the Quiet, which is only the bestselling album of that bestselling musician’s storied oeuvre.

In addition to the a cappella “The Lord’s Prayer” at album’s end (he covers “Amazing Grace” as well), English came up with a dozen songs in all (with some, he says, written just a day or two before he hit “Record”). And his testimony, like his history of performing (“an open mic or two in a pub”), is similarly bare-bones.

“I’ve been a Christian for probably about two years,” he says. “I didn’t grow up in a Christian family or anything. But I had, I guess you could say, inner conflicts and stuff. And I just found peace when I reached out to God. Or maybe He drew me near to Him. I haven’t been the same since.”

More layered, especially for a millennial, is his taste in music. “I’ve gone through phases,” he says. “I’ve liked crooners like Tony Bennett and Sinatra and jazz instrumentalists like Bill Evans. And I like soul music too.”

It’s folk, however, that has left the clearest fingerprint on his own style. “I like a lot of folk music,” he says. “I like the subtlety of a relaxed kind of sound.”

More specifically, he likes the sparse, haunted melancholy of the late Nick Drake. “Yes,” English admits, “I’m quite a fan. So maybe I was influenced unconsciously by him.”

As for where he goes from here, he hasn’t ruled out busking. “I don’t know if there’s much of a demand for spiritual-type songs, amongst my generation anyways,” he says of the taking-it-to-the-streets approach. “But I feel like I want to use whatever gifts I have to sing about God rather than just love and stereotypical stuff.”