Brown Horse On Making Three Albums In Three Years And Their Strange American Homecoming

Following their third album in three years ‘Total Dive,’ we chat with Patrick Turner and Rowan Braham of Norwich’s Brown Horse

Patrick Turner is describing the last night of Brown Horse’s first US tour. A sold-out show in New York. Everything they’d been building towards with the new album arriving at the same time.

“It just felt like such a big deal,” he says. A few days later, he was back behind the counter at the shop where he works, serving regulars who vaguely know that he is in a band. “Aren’t you still playing in the US?” one of them asked. He laughs as he tells it. It’s the kind of detail that shouldn’t be funny but slightly is; but it also gets at something real about why Brown Horse sound the way they do. The slight sense of struggle, the ordinary life closing back in around the extraordinary thing: it’s not background noise to the music. It’s where the music comes from.

‘Total Dive,’ their third album in three years, has been described as their darkest yet, a step into murkier water with only a little cautious light at the edges. Turner doesn’t entirely disagree, though he’s quick to point out that the tone of any given Brown Horse record isn’t really decided by one person. All four members — Patrick Turner, Rowan Braham, Emma Tovell and Nyle Holihan — bring songs to the table, and the record that eventually takes shape is less a clear vision than a process of elimination.

“There’s a lot of songs that we all share with each other,” Turner explains, “and then it’s kind of whittling them down to like ten that we can record.” For this one, he found himself gravitating toward the heavier material. “I feel a bit more at home singing and delivering that kind of stuff,” he tells me.

The collaborative songwriting is one of the defining features of Brown Horse as a band, partly because you’d never know it from listening. The records feel cohesive in a way that suggests a single sensibility at work, not four. Braham describes that coherence as something that emerges through the process rather than by design.

It’s only when they start working on a song together — figuring out how to make it fit the instruments, the setup they have, what Turner is comfortable singing — that it starts to sound recognisably like them. There’s something slightly strange about it, he admits, taking something written from your own voice and handing it over to be reshaped by the group. “It’s not like a cover of it, but it’s kind of like a new version.”

It hasn’t always been smooth. Turner is honest about the vulnerability of it, especially in the early days, even among close friends. “You can really get … defensive about certain parts,” he says. “Just over the last few years, it’s just been a process of building that trust.” He sent a new voice note to the band’s WhatsApp group the day before we spoke and he still felt that familiar knot in his stomach before pressing send. “We’re not just thinking, ‘we’re obviously so great at what we do, everyone’s gonna love this.'”

That particular flavour of earned, unassuming honesty is what makes Brown Horse’s lyrics land the way they do. The songs deal in very specific details and yet audiences keep finding themselves inside them. Braham seems slightly bewildered by this, in the best way. “It’s kind of strange for us to put music out and find out people are actually reading the lyrics or listening to what we’re saying and telling us it’s relatable,” he says. “We don’t necessarily feel like we’re the most relatable people.”

After shows, he’s been surprised by how far some people’s interpretations travel from where he was when he wrote something. He doesn’t correct them. It’s one of the most satisfying parts, he says, watching something you made in your house mean something to someone else entirely. “We don’t really take that for granted. It’s very strange and amazing.”

Part of what keeps the songs so grounded is, straightforwardly, their lives. Both Turner and Braham work regular jobs. Tovell and Holihan, who aren’t here today, both work full time. The slight “sense of struggle,” Turner thinks, probably does make its way into the songs. “But, you know, we wouldn’t trade it for anything.”

One album a year for three years sounds relentless from the outside. From the inside, apparently, it hasn’t felt that quick. Four songwriters help with the material, and there’s a practical logic to the pace too: new music makes touring easier, tickets are easier to sell, the whole thing stays financially viable. But Turner also describes it as something that just feels natural, almost like a school calendar.

The last three years have been so dense with activity that it feels as though it’s been six or seven. Their first album feels impossibly distant. “When you’re in it, it doesn’t feel like things are moving particularly quickly, especially when you’re sort of clocking in at the day job for quite a big part of the year.”

The albums get made quickly too. Their debut was recorded in three days; ‘Total Dive‘ took a couple of weeks. That speed isn’t just economic necessity, though it started out that way, it’s also a philosophy. Braham is clear that they want to preserve what’s there before overworking it: the energy of a band still figuring a song out, the slight roughness that signals something alive. “I personally definitely like things to be a bit rougher,” he says. “Some of the kind of improvisation of working out the song to still be sort of there in the final recording.”

He can’t imagine spending more than two or three weeks on an album and still liking it at the end. Better to leave the studio still excited and let the songs develop further in the live shows. The first album’s tracks have changed significantly in performance, he says, which is its own kind of value for the people buying tickets. You get to see the developed versions, not just the document.

The conversation inevitably turns to America. The US tour clearly meant something beyond adding a new geography to their touring repertoire. Brown Horse have an unmistakably Americana-adjacent quality to their sound, the kind of music that feels more at home in a small room in Chicago than it might at a UK festival.

When I mention this, neither of them really argue. Turner and Braham both spent time in San Francisco: Turner did his year abroad there about a decade ago, and Braham came out to visit. One night they went to see Jonathan Richman play at the Make Out Room. Going back to play their own show in the same room, ten years later, was, Turner says, “very strange and great.”

The Chicago show at the Hideout was another highlight, a room with the kind of lineage that matters to them. What they weren’t expecting was how thoroughly people already knew the songs, all three albums’ worth, despite the first two not being available to buy in the States and no US press until now. Braham describes finding, at nearly every stop, a handful of people who were genuinely glad they’d come, telling their friends, showing up at the next date. “It felt really nice,” he says, almost like a homecoming. They’re going back in September.

As for what comes next, they’ve only just started to think about it. Turner sent the first voice note for a possible fourth record to the group chat the day before our conversation. He’s been deep in Richard Buckner for months, and the new song still carries a lot of that. But something about being on tour, the live energy, the rooms responding, has made him want to write something that moves differently. “A real rocker,” he says, “where like halfway through listening to it for the first time, everyone in the crowd will be like, right, yeah, we get it. This is great. Let’s go.” He laughs a little. “That isn’t really where I was at for the last one.”

For now, though, Brown Horse are back home, picking up shifts, chipping away. “We’re trying to keep it going,” Turner says, “that’s why we have to kind of fit in this work when we’re back home and try and save money.” He doesn’t say it with any self-pity. Just the plain facts of it, the same way the songs deliver theirs.

You can catch Brown Horse on their upcoming tour.

Listen to new album ‘Total Dive’ here:

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