Frank Turner isn’t Joe Strummer, Bob Dylan or Phil Ochs. Over the course of a 20-minute Zoom chat about songwriting, the British singer-songwriter acknowledged the influence and examples of those fellow artists. But, if anyone can teach him anything new about writing songs today – 20 years into his own successful solo music career – it may be a donkey in a pit.
Turner spoke with the Houston Press from North Carolina, where he was preparing for a show on his latest tour, a co-headlining run with Descendents. The tour makes its Houston stop Friday, February 27 at House of Blues.
We were quick – too quick, perhaps – to suggest the political climate of the United States in 2026 seems rife with opportunities for thoughtful, guitar-playing, punk artists like Turner to create new music to mobilize the masses.
“I mean, it’s an interesting moment in history to be a songwriter. I guess the first thing I would say is that there is a slightly trite thing that some people say, they kind of go, ‘Well, the world’s gone to hell, but at least we’ll get some cool punk songs or some cool folk songs or whatever,’ and that seems like a sort of privileged statement to me. I mean, I think that I’d rather the world wasn’t going to hell. I think that a lot of people would rather that than having songs.”
While the turmoil might energize some artists, Turner said, “for me, I find it slightly paralyzing, you know, if you specifically talk about American politics. First of all, I wrote the political things I had to say on an album called Be More Kind that came out in 2017. And I’m not sure that I have the energy, I’m not sure I have the songwriting energy to kind of try and make those statements again. Those songs still exist. I keep playing them. ‘1933,’ ‘Be More Kind,’ ‘Sand in the Gears,’ songs like that.
“But also, I’m very conscious I’m an outsider and it’s a difficult balance to strike, I find, because you know, the obvious riposte, ‘Well, you’re not from America.’ I mean, it’s true. It’s not immediately invalidating, but it certainly gives me a pause for thought in terms of my phraseology and things like that.
“The final thing to be said on the subject is – and I want to speak honestly about this – my ability to tour in the United States and indeed to make a living in the United States is dependent on my visa and we live in a situation in which my concern about that is genuine,” he said. “Obviously, I hate that on a lot of levels and I’d love to just sit here and say fuck the system and throw all caution to the wind. But me and my band and crew have families to support. That’s not to say that I’m not going to speak up at all, but it means I need to be slightly careful about the way that I do it.”
Turner is the first to admit songs from his 10 studio albums aren’t generally considered political. His best songs reflect on things we can do or connections we can build to make our lives better and to make the world better, too. Because there’s something punk rock about those notions, whether delivered tenderly on tracks like “Be More Kind” or in rave-ups like “…Get Better,” Turner and his band, The Sleeping Souls, are often aligned with acts like their current tourmates, California punk veterans, Descendents, and punk lifers NOFX.
On tour, Turner is seeing audiences who’ve gone to the shows to escape the world around them, which he appreciates, “but, at the same time I grew up listening to the music of Joe Strummer and there’s the old saw about ‘This is what Joe Strummer trained us for,’ and all that kind of thing.
“So, I kind of go back and forth a little bit on that. I mean, ultimately I never wanted to be a protest singer and I don’t consider myself to be one, and the vast majority of my songs are not about political subjects, but I think that defining songwriting and art generally as having to be one thing or the other is just a really limited view of the world. I think the great thing about art is that it can be whatever it wants to be, and sometimes that might be political. But sometimes it might not be so. More than anything else, I reserve the right to sing about whatever the fuck I want to sing about.”
That’s what Turner is truly focusing on, doing what he’s earned the right to do despite the expectation that “if your art isn’t political, then it’s a dereliction of duty of some kind, to which the only possible answer is go fuck yourself, because I will write about whatever the fuck I want to write about.
“Ultimately, I think there is a role for art to play in discussing politics and all the rest of it. But I don’t think it’s remotely as important as the role of commentators, journalists and indeed politicians discussing it,” Turner added. “I met somebody many years ago who told me that Bob Dylan caused the Civil Rights Movement and I was just like, ‘What the fuck are you talking about?’ I mean, the insult to the people who actually did the legwork on that one by saying no, it was all the Jewish guy from Minnesota.”
Turner said Dylan did create a blueprint for lasting songs. For anyone deciding to write protest songs in 2026, he advised against falling into what he called the “Phil Ochs trap” and to maybe listen to more punk acts, too.
“Phil Ochs, he was an amazing songwriter who was contemporaneous with Dylan. But the difference was that Dylan wrote in this broader-strokes way that was more social than political and Phil wrote extremely specifically about a bill that just got passed in 1971 or whatever. And Phil has been largely forgotten by history. More’s the pity because he was a great songwriter, but there was a specificity to what he was writing about that dated his material instantaneously. I think punk rock has always been kind of broader strokes when it comes to politics, you know, and it’s about self-reliance and self-definition and independence.”
If current events don’t necessarily have him take up pad and pen, what does?
“I guess what I would say is that I don’t really have a system, I never really have,” he began. He said a song might begin with “a part of my brain that’s chewing things over pretty constantly,” or “on the flip side, if I just come up with a turn of phrase I really like that feels song worthy, then that’s the sort of genesis of something.”
Turner likens the whole process to baking, beginning with gathering the perfect ingredients and ending when there’s a fully-finished product. Unlike a recipe, there’s no set time for how long it may take to bake. Even after all this time, he still considers creating a new song “a complicated thing.”
“I think the idea, the sort of cliche that you kind of just lie on a chaise lounge and a completed song pops into your mind, that’s happened to me like twice ever and I’ve written a lot more than two songs. So, I think there’s a lot of work.
For instance, Turner said, “I’ve got this little dyad chord sequence that I really like that’s been kind of kicking around the back of my brain for a good, few years. The other day I was in the shower and I was thinking about reading a parable about a donkey that’s in a hole and people are shoveling dirt down into the hole to try and cover the donkey. But the donkey uses it as a ramp to get out of the hole and I thought that was kind of cool and I was sort of kicking that around.
“Then in sound check yesterday I tried the words that I was kind of toying with over that chord sequence and there was a click, you know, they kind of fit, and it was like, ‘Oh, okay, there’s a spark, there’s something to kind of pay attention to,’ but it might be a year before I finish that. It might be three days. But it’s more likely to be a few months before it’s actually knocked into a finished shape.”
Frank Turner isn’t a name dispassionate music listeners might know, like Bob Dylan. But he’s also not a forgotten songwriter, like Phil Ochs. What he’s learned about his job over the years has helped him to the place he wants to be as an artist. Occasionally, critics ponder why he’s not on the top of this or that chart, but no matter the dirt they try to shovel onto him, Turner uses it to rise above.
“I’ve had moments in my career where I’ve kind of dipped a toe into the mainstream. To some extent, those days are kind of behind me now and there are people who want to snigger in my direction because of that, but it’s like you don’t understand where I come from. The music I make was always supposed to be outsider music. I don’t want to be on Coachella, that’s not the vibe here,” he said.
“Punk rock was born out of the situations in America, in the UK and indeed elsewhere in the world where there were groups of people who felt completely alienated and decided to build their own structures to cope with the world around them. And that’s still very much how I see what I do. You know, it’s about building – community building, building trust, building a set of values that people can agree on that may not be there to change the world and may not overthrow governments and anything else.
“But what they might do is improve individual people’s lives and give us a sense of meaning and community and communion, in fact, would be a better word. And I think that is really powerful and really important. Did music ever change the world? I don’t think so. But did music change people? Abso-fucking-lutely, including me. And there’s value to that, you know, and it’s not to be sniffed at.”
Frank Turner & the Sleeping Souls, with Descendents, Friday, February 27 at House of Blues, 1204 Caroline. Doors at 6 p.m. for this all-ages show. $58.50 and up.