Jon Boden: Afterglow

This is less of a review and more of an exorcism. For the love of everything, please no one show this to Jon.

So in 2023, I got, um...

...really, er, into...

Let's just say that Afterglow got me through a tough time.

In November of 2021, it was announced that Bellowhead was doing a reunion tour in the UK the following year. The announcement email was followed up by a series of frantic "you're coming right" texts from my friends in Kent, and in November of 2022, I was on a plane to Heathrow.

That visit was...a lot. It isn't an exaggeration to call it life-changing, and by the time I arrived back home, I was in a bit of a spiral.

(Bellowhead was great)

(I saw them twice)

When we had first bought tickets for the gig and planned out housing and generally lost our minds with excitement, the plan had been for my then-husband to join us. The two of us had been meant to fly over together, stay with one of my friends, run around some folk clubs, and then head back to the States. Things may have gone a bit differently if we'd stuck to the original plan, but a few months ahead of time, he sheepishly begged out, citing a lack of interest and some travel anxiety, and I reassured him with genuine enthusiasm that it was perfectly alright.

I was relieved, truth be told, which probably should have been a bigger flag for me than it was at the time, but it was a simple fact that he and I didn't share a common interest in English folk, and these were my friends, and we didn't have to do everything together, surely, so wasn't this completely fine-

And it was. It really was. I was quite certain it was.

(it wasn't)

My husband was a perfectly lovely man. I should start there and state it emphatically. He wasn't unkind to me, he kept up his end of the housework, we had good conversations. We had some quiet affection, and we looked out for each other in our own ways.

If I'd had a better sense of myself in those days, I would have perhaps been able to pinpoint why things weren't working for us, but I had chalked up our troubles to having spent our first year of marriage in COVID lockdowns and had naively pushed onward, figuring things would feel "right" if we could just get back to a "normal" world. And perhaps they might have been, had things been different - had we been different - but "we" had been built on slightly shaky foundations, and by the time I left for England, the cracks had begun to show.

None of that is to say we weren't fond of each other or that the marriage was doomed from the start. I think there were a few ways it could have gone. But the both of us had our walls, and we never quite seemed to find a way around them. By the time I realized what it was, I think it was too late.

"It" was a distinct lack of emotional intimacy - of trust, of emotional safety. We so feared being burdensome to one another that we kept a lot of things close to the chest. When we did open up, it was always after enough time had passed for us to process our feelings on our own first, so we'd be able to rationally and calmly explain that a thing from a month ago had hurt us (but it was fine now!). We were so afraid of getting it wrong that forgot to simply love each other; we were so afraid of being abandoned, we made ourselves small.

I don't think he ever actually believed that I loved him.

So when I plopped down on my friend's couch - a man who, up to this point, I'd only ever met on the internet - and he asked me if I was hungry, my brain froze.

It was a perfectly sensible question. I'd just arrived from an overnight flight, and we'd traipsed all the way from Heathrow out to Kent, navigating a tube strike and a shopping trolley on the train tracks on top of the normal sort of headaches of commuting. He was simply being polite.

But that deeply-held knowledge that I am burdensome for just existing takes over my brain in moments such as these, and it becomes a tangled question of just how burdensome I can allow myself to be. Here was, in simple fact, a stranger who's house I was to be staying in for nearly two weeks, already putting himself out for my sake (obviously he did not feel that way or he would never have offered, but that's hardly the point), and now I'd be asking him to do something for me (again, he offered, I do realize this), and I barely know where his kitchen is let alone my way around it, so I can hardly offer to help, and anyway my brain is moving slower than normal because I really am quite tired, and I'm in a new place and there's a lot of information processing at once and-

So add to what is obviously a remnant of a messy childhood the fact that I'm neurodivergent and struggle with hunger cues (I simply don't know when I'm hungry, most of the time) and everything screeched to a grinding halt.

My husband would have patiently waited for things to start up again. He would have stared at me, well meaning and antsy, while I slowly rebooted my brain and came to a decision about whether I was hungry or not, and if I was, to a decision about what I would like to eat in that moment, and then offer all of the ways I could help so as to lessen the burden of my existence and-

"I'm making a cup of tea. Can I bring you one?"

I short circuited.

This is a very silly thing to say, and I have sorted out a lot of things since that morning, but that was genuinely the first time in my life that someone had done that - simply stepped in and solved things. No shame, no awkwardly waiting for fear of getting it wrong while I floundered helplessly in the tumult of my own head. He saw I was struggling and simply fixed it.

Tea was precisely what I needed, and the cheese and snacks he brought along didn't hurt either.

Over the next few months, I came to a couple of massive conclusions that took me years to reckon with:

1. I felt safe - really, properly safe - with my friend

2. I had not actually felt safe with another person before

3. I was married

   
   

The next couple of years were...hard.

That feeling of safety, coupled with the fact that we were, really, quite good friends and messaged every day, turned into a deep affection which turned into love, and my messy little brain could not yet conceive of a deep platonic love, only a romantic one, and so I pined.

God did I pine.

(Probably I don't need to tell you that he did not feel the same way about me. The romantic feelings did settle in time, but I still wanted more from our friendship than he knew how to give, and things eventually fell apart between us. We haven't spoken in months, and I don't really know that we ever will again.)

It was in the throes of this madness that Boden's lyrics started catching my subconscious and then eventually my thinking mind. I think initially that was why this album hit so hard. The yearning in the first few tracks especially is palpable. So much of what I was feeling was just right there and it hit exactly where I needed it.

Gonna see you again - I know it's gonna be alright

It's so funny to be walking down this street again - I don't know how but I know we're gonna meet again

I don't know if you really feel the same - I don't know if you even know my name - but I'll see you when the lights come on

Leaving England that first time ached. I had this distinct sense that I was leaving home rather than returning to it, and I wept bitterly in the airport. I knew I'd be back, I feared I'd never be back. I had so many things swirling in my head and I didn't know where to put any of them. And through it all, there were the daily Signal notifications from my friend and Jon Boden's Afterglow.

I had initially picked this album up on a bit of a whim. Seeing Bellowhead live sparked a curiosity in Boden's other projects, and when I got back from England, I threw his name into Spotify (boo, hiss) to see what came up first, and that ended up being Afterglow.

As a result, I didn't know anything at all going in. I wasn't familiar with Floodplain (don't worry, that's long since been remedied), and I didn't have liner notes or anything else to go on. The only thing I knew was that Jon Boden was in Bellowhead and that I liked him.

(Afterglow is not a Bellowhead album)

(Paul and Sam are here, so it's not not a Bellowhead album, but)

Afterglow is very intentionally a narrative from start to finish, following the journey of two lovers who meet and just miss each other and then slowly find each other again only for things to end as they began. I don't think I picked up on the extent of the narrative element for quite some time - not because it wasn't obvious and well-crafted, because it is, but because I was simply in a place where the individual tracks resonated with my own personal narrative at the time. I felt the longing - I just didn't catch the story playing out.

As recently as a few months ago (it is currently August of 2025), I had a revelation about the final two tracks on the album and how they beautifully concluded the narrative that was being set up, and by that time, I couldn't even begin to guess to how many times I'd listened to the album start to finish.

The Spotify stats at the beginning give you some sense of it, but I was listening to this album constantly. It was in my car, it was at work, it was at home while I was tidying up. I was moving away from Spotify at that time, as well, so even those stats don't really manage to capture the scope - most of my listens were on YouTube or Bandcamp or the CD I burned from my Bandcamp purchase.

I wasn't always actively listening - often, it was just a blanket over my shoulders in a chilly room. At some point, I think just having the album on meant I wasn't completely alone, and it got me through some dark days.

It's funny going back to this album now (I never really left it, exactly, but it's on a more monthly rotation than a daily one these days). The personal narrative I was living through when this album first gripped me has largely played itself out at last, so it resonates differently. It's still something I reach for for comfort, and it's still something I mindlessly sing along with when I need to focus, but I find I'm more drawn to the intended narrative now, more caught up in the musicality and the stunning arrangements and the cinematic scope of it all.

Afterglow is really a glorious album, and it genuinely didn't get enough credit when it came out. Even disregarding the intensity with which it found me at exactly the right time, it is a musical triumph. The threads Boden weaves from track to track, musically and lyrically; the production; the performances. It's spectacular stuff.

If you haven't given it a listen in a minute, it might be time for a reckoning.