Horrible Occurrences is the title of Owen Ashworth’s new album as Advance Base, and there is truth in advertising. In these songs—all centered around a fictional town called Richmond and featuring an interlinked cast of characters—you will hear stories of death and disappearance, climactic confrontations and unsolved mysteries. “Richmond is just this place where all the bad memories live,” Ashworth says with a laugh, and nearly 30 years into his songwriting career, none of his records have packed quite the emotional intensity of this one. And yet something alchemical happens in the telling of these tales. Like a masterful short story collection, Horrible Occurrences is inspiring and alive, idiosyncratic and electric, pulling you closer with each word.
While it’s the most conceptually ambitious project in Ashworth’s vast catalog—which spans his early lo-fi work as Casiotone for the Painfully Alone to his later recordings as Advance Base—he describes Horrible Occurrences as a project with deep personal roots. In the six years since his last full-length collection of originals, 2018’s Animal Companionship, Ashworth summoned inspiration from traveling around the country, returning to cities that he once called home and revisiting old ghosts, memories, and fragments of unfinished ideas. Blending truth and fiction into a dreamlike composite, the songs convey the winding path our memory takes as the years go by, giving voice to a subconscious that is still unpacking old memories for new wisdom.
“My songs are always pretty therapeutic for me,” Ashworth affirms. “But I had more of my own mental health stuff that I was wrestling with this time. Working through these songs was helpful.” As he plotted out the narratives, writing and rewriting songs, he found new inspiration in live performance, assuming the most traditional role of a folk singer: driving from town to town, telling these stories on solitary stages, collaborating with an active audience to see where each idea would lead on any given night. He noticed that sometimes people would laugh while others were stricken with melancholy; strangers would mention similarities to their own experience or offer surprising interpretations to the more ambiguous scenes.
Approaching the songs in his home studio, Ashworth aimed to keep the same spare, intimate arrangements from his live set—just his low, conversational voice set against the familiar hum and whirr of his electric pianos and synthesizers. Drawing inspiration from the otherworldly loneliness depicted on ’80s masterpieces like Arthur Russell’s World of Echo and Bruce Springsteen’s Nebraska, the music never crowds Ashworth’s detailed storytelling but it also never feels auxiliary. Just as the gentle thrills of “The One About the Rabbit in the Snow” approximate the cozy vacuousness of an ill-attended bar gig on Christmas Eve Eve, the fuzzed-out slow-burn of “Brian’s Golden Hour” conjures the warped colors of a vintage skateboard tape, set in the sentimental lighting of a Terrence Malick film.
These are beautiful songs—sweeping and melodic, blending relatable themes with hyper-specific detail. But they stick with you for their ability to strike dissonant, unforgettable emotional chords. “You can’t beat Shirley Jackson for the feeling of dread in her writing,” Ashworth says of his literary inspiration. “Even though there’s not a lot of gore or outright supernatural occurrence, I love the uneasy feeling so many of her books give me.” Where other songwriters might explore this subject matter for morality tales, zooming out to happy endings or leaning hard into the crushing weight of existence, Ashworth finds a resting place in an almost zen-like unknowability. “I was trying to find the right balance between darkness and compassion,” Ashworth says of the album’s protracted genesis, and his focus pays off.
It is this pervasive empathy in Ashworth’s songwriting—along with his writerly gift for clear settings and complex characters—that has made him a guiding light for so many independent artists. As evidenced by his work running the indie label Orindal Records (Dear Nora, Gia Margaret, Wednesday) and the genre-spanning cast who contributed to 2022’s tribute compilation You Were Alone: An Owen Ashworth Almanac (Dear Life Records), his voice has trickled through many of today’s most exciting songwriters. While Horrible Occurrences features many of his most personal narratives—songs that could have been written by no one but Ashworth—it also feels something like a defining statement: cataloging a lifetime of worry in a voice that sounds as clear and affirming as a close friend sitting across the table.
The things that happen throughout Horrible Occurrences are what we tend to call “unspeakable”—events that draw gut-level responses just from acknowledging that they could happen. But part of the triumph of the record is how simply and generously Ashworth finds the language to share them with us. Whether it’s through a voice that sounds like an awe-struck teenager in “Brian’s Golden Hour,” or a young woman reconciling her mixed feelings about meeting a stranger in “Rene Goodnight,” or a father returning home from the liquor store to find his young daughter wandering outside the house, terrified she’s been abandoned, in “The Tooth Fairy,” each song is full of love and life, unguarded emotion and vast layers of meaning. And if there’s a pervading message to the plainspoken murder ballad that opens the album, “The Year I Lived in Richmond,” it’s that the protagonist’s story is destined to be repeated long after she skips town and her tragedy recedes into the past. For characters like her—that is, the ones who make it out okay—these are the types of memories they will be tossing and turning their whole lives, waiting for quiet moments to confide them among the people they trust. For the rest of us, they are signs of life along the highway on a dark, snowy night: reminders that, as isolated as we may feel, we are not alone on the road.
