B Howard Crist is someone whose music I discovered by chance: in my hometown, there were a few acoustic-based musicians playing at a winery restaurant, and I decided to go last year in May. Crist's soulful vocals paired with the beautiful simplicity of an acoustic guitar cut through my soul, much like how outlaw country hit me the first time I heard it.
I have followed Crist's music since and was delighted when he started releasing singles - "The nameless (Live at Diddy's Kantina)" [Sept. 2023], "Drive Away" [Nov. 2023], and "The Way To Yesterday (Acoustic Version)" [Aug. 2024].
I interviewed Crist about how he got into music, his influences, and the stories behind his songs.
LP: How did you get into music?
BHC: The house I grew up in with my mother was a house of music when my father wasn’t around. He couldn’t stand it. My mother on the other hand was a lover of country and western, anything from Marty Robbins to little Jimmy Dickens to Johnny Cash, Waylon Jennings, The Williams, Conway Twitty, Ernest Tubb, Jimmy Rogers. And it wasn’t anything out of the ordinary for her and my siblings to be gathered around the record player singing along.
And as I got older, my brother was also extremely into music. He introduced me to Led Zeppelin, Black Sabbath, The Rolling Stones, Judas Priest, Ozzy Osbourne, solo Dio, Iron Maiden, Metallica.
Then I dabbled with playing instruments here and there with little to no support from my parents mostly due to being poor. But one thing I could do that did not cost any money and that was practice singing. if I was off anywhere by myself, that’s what I was doing because I didn’t have to have anything else other than me.
I didn’t have any instruments to learn how to play, so when I got into high school, I took choir. I didn’t have a tremendous amount of success there, but it was successful and I really enjoyed it. Once I graduated from high school, I continued to try to learn to play guitar when my father had apparently had enough and talked me into quitting to try to look for work and have what he called a productive life, so I didn’t play music for the better part of 20 years once I finally gave it up completely.
And that all changed in the fall of 2019 when I was arguably at the lowest low of my life, I made the decision to do something that I wanted to do for myself and ultimately anybody who might enjoy anything I did.
LP: Who are you influenced by?
BHC: Quite literally all the above-mentioned artists that I cut my teeth on, but what ultimately led to my decision to pursue being what I believe I was born to do was first started off with Tyler Childers.
It was a raw emotional, dark unapologetic truth. Being a really devout metalhead I struggled for a long time wanting to play that; ultimately, I believe you are at the end of the day going to play what you were meant to play. When I first discovered Tyler‘s music, I quickly felt like coming home. And realize that it was as heavy as any metal music I ever listened to just in a different way. And from that is where I found Colter Wall and ultimately Sturgill Simpson. And when I found Sturgill Simpson, I knew that this was what I was looking for my whole life.
So one time in a very pivotal moment in my life, I asked Alexa to play Sturgill Simpson and that was the first time that I ever heard Jason Isbell for whatever reason that’s what thought I said, or maybe it was just what I really needed to hear that, and Alexa Simpson, Jason Isbell’s “If We Were Vampires” started playing. And then, from that moment forward, it was a rebirth for me.
As I dug headfirst into his catalog, I was then and still am blown away about his songwriting. It was that moment that I actually understood that it was lyrical songwriting that always turned me on. So I was able to go back and look through all of the really important bands, musicians and writers that I was really into growing up like Roger Waters, Trent Reznor, Maynard Keenan. People had such a profound way of observing the world around them and somehow eloquently putting it on a paper that made me feel like they knew a secret about me.
LP: Why did you write your song “The Nameless”?
BHC: Short answer? My mother.
Long answer? Heavy answer?
I wrote that song the night my mother passed to begin the only way I could think to approach unraveling the things that I've gone through in my life, and growing up something of a mama’s boy, I knew that being alone was going to be the biggest challenge that I had face as a man. See I don’t think a man truly becomes a man till both of his parents are gone. If you have your parents around one or both of them, it's not the same as when you lose them both - that alone I don't think is anything possible to be explained. So I sat out to write about different ways these types of things tend to come up in life. Not just from my own experiences but also those I have seen in the world around me.
I knew from somewhat of a tumultuous childhood, but I had a lot of things that I was going to have to work through, and I couldn’t think of a better medium [than music].
I don’t know if I heard this somewhere or where I came up with this, but I’ve often told myself that great art very seldom comes from joyful times. So I begin paralleling several aspects of my life and lives of people that were close to me that affected me and affected people that I loved. I approached it with a near intensity to try to make sense of the world around me. Not unlike some of my above mentioned songwriting lyrical heroes have done I found and still do great knowledge with how to deal with a lot of life difficulties in those lyrics and messages.
And I named the song “The Nameless” for Clint Eastwood character and the fistful of dollars trilogy. It was from my mother that I love western movies.The Good, The Bad, The Ugly I still say is the best western of all time. So I came up with the idea of the nameless, a young man born into tragedy where his mother had passed during childbirth, and his father hated him for it and didn’t even name him; but since he was all that he had left of his wife, he couldn’t cast him aside. And by living such a misfortunate life it ultimately led him into situations where he has to take life and ultimately caused a crooked law man to come after him.
The premise was potentially to bring the argument of nature versus nurture. There’s more of that story to come, but we can talk about that some other time.
LP: Tell me about your song “Drive Away.”
BHC: The song “Drive Away” was written again, working through traumas, not just from myself, but from nearly every woman and some men that I love and call friends and family. I wrote that song about an experience I had as a young man being taken advantage of after I was slipped something in a drink, and what I now have come to know so many, many others who are survivors of having things forced upon them against their will. I wanted to have an avenue where they could connect and tell their stories freely and safely to hopefully in someway have them gain some of their power backs from what was taken from them
LP: What made you want to write “The Way to Yesterday”?
BHC: I wrote “The Way to Yesterday’ after a long night of music in Iowa. I got home around 4 o’clock in the morning, slept for a couple hours, woke up to try to get my day started because I had more music to play and sound production to run that night and I live on the same patch of foreign ground that previous country years of my family has lived on, and especially my childhood and for my bedroom, I can look out of the window and see the old farmhouse in the yard that I used to play in as a kid with my mother and my brother and my father. I was listening to a Killswitch Engage song, called “The Tribute to the Fallen” and as I mentioned before, I’m not playing that kind of stuff, but what I can do in my head is realize I can write a song about what he’s talking about so that’s what I did. I wrote a song as tribute to my mother, and my father, and my brother who have all passed and, for both good and bad, are a big reason of what I am today both for inspiration of what I want and what I don’t want to be
LP: What’s next for you as a musician?
BHC: Everything. Every single thing that comes my way is what is next for me. I will continue to study my heroes and learn as much from them asI can and hope that I can somehow spread that message and that help that they’ve given me and that I have found and, in many ways, hopefully I can provide the same for somebody else. Because at the end of the day, that is why I’m here still.
So I will continue to approach my mission and that is unapologetically and truthfully be myself. To make the hard conversations, to tell the hard truth, to be defiant in the face of stigma.
I have a really good time playing pretty sad music and that’s because I myself have a lot of sadness to work through, but that is ultimately what saved my life because depression is a lying asshole. It will tell you that you were a burden on people. It will tell you that no one understands you and that you’re the only one like you and you should sit down and shut up and stay to yourself. And that’s quite the contrary I found in so much of the music that I listen to, and write because here I heard countless artists put down my thoughts on paper and they didn’t even know I existed - so all those things that depression and anxiety tell you is true, it would be impossible for that to happen. So that’s my vendetta as a musician.
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