Happy 10th Anniversary to David Ford’s third studio album Let The Hard Times Roll, originally released February 15, 2010.
David Ford is an English singer-songwriter who makes emotionally complex music about the ineptitude of governments, romantic yearning, trains, the economy, religion, and, once, toast. His sonic style oscillates from piano ballads to swashbuckling rootsy tunes to spitfire diatribes. Live, he’s a one-man-band, building a colossal show with the help of a loop pedal while offering banter on why encores are a sham, the time he won a French Grammy, and, once, why Lady Gaga’s “Poker Face” is not a song (complete with Powerpoint Presentation). Ford contains multitudes—but there’s something that unifies it.
The skeleton key to understanding the foundation to this far-reaching work is his third LP Let The Hard Times Roll; each of his other albums has a kindred spirit somewhere in these thirteen tracks. With each cut so markedly different from the one that came before, LTHTR is somewhat bewildering upon first listen, but starts to make sense of itself over time. Strange as this might sound, the album has geography—as we move from track to track, we feel like we are transported to different neighborhoods in the downtrodden city that Ford builds.
It’s worth pointing out that this concretizing of Ford’s artistic ethos came by way of desperation. After getting dumped by his label and without the money to hire a producer, Ford set about recording Let The Hard Times Roll with the intent of making one last great record before the lease on his studio expired.
Thanks to no oversight and quite a lot of red wine, the album is somehow both reckless and meticulous, the result of a dedicated songwriter released from the musical machine. While many of Ford’s other records are brilliant (see especially 2005’s I Sincerely Apologise For All The Trouble I’ve Caused and 2018’s Animal Spirits), LTHTR is Ford at his most pure. A man who’s spent much of his career (and his entire memoir, I Choose This) railing against the music industry gives us proof of what can happen when he’s left to his own devices.
The album’s desperate ethos begins in urgent with “Panic,” a song that at first seems to belong to Ford’s longer tradition of lyric-driven, Big Point Songs (see “Requiem” and “State of the Union”). In fact, “Panic” subverts his usual idiom by lyrically and vocally placing Ford within the chaos he describes, rather than detailing it from a distance (as is his usual approach). In placing himself within the madness, he establishes the overarching argument of the album: that nobody is exempt from misery.
Let The Hard Times Roll is also shaggy, somewhat full of abandon (per the memoir, this is where the wine came in). “Surfin’ Guantanamo Bay” is exactly what you think it is. “She’s Not The One” is perhaps the most fun song in Ford’s repertoire, with swaggering vocal lines and a horn-backed final chorus (it also happens to be about Margaret Thatcher).
We also see some uncharacteristic experimentation in the slower “Meet Me In The Middle” and “Missouri,” the former a nearly-ambient tune from long before such things were fashionable in indie rock, and the latter a barely-song that dedicates as much time to music as it does to a nearly-inaudible talk radio sample.
While Ford is known for theming albums around particular sounds, no two cuts from Let The Hard Times Roll are quite the same; it’s such a big tent that it feels like there’s nothing holding the record together. When we leave the tranquil tragedy of “Stephen,” a beautiful song about a murdered Northern Irish police officer, and enter into the stomping and shouting of “Nothing At All,” it’s like we’ve jumped into a completely different universe.
This is the point. In casting Let The Hard Times Roll in as far-flung a way as possible, Ford demonstrates how hardship manifests itself in every possible way in every possible life – there’s personal struggle, political struggle, economic struggle, romantic struggle, and sometimes the overlap among them all. Even though everyone comes from a different place, difficulty unifies. In fact, it embodies the human experience.
Which, of course, sounds unbelievably trite when you say it out loud. In our heads, we all know this is true. The more difficult thing is to actually feel the universality of this difficulty, and that’s where the real power of Let The Hard Times Roll rests. Rather than serving up a series of banal platitudes, Ford makes all of these different kinds of pain feel real and immediate. So when he asks for us to fight back in “Call To Arms,” even with defeat certain, we know exactly what he’s asking of us.
LISTEN: