Bright is the Ring of Words

Coming together over the span of a year and a half, the album was recorded in Ashworth’s tiny room in San Francisco’s Mission District and in a middle school orchestra room north of the Golden Gate, where his multi-instrumentalist collaborator, Tristan Arnold, teaches. Bringing together the classical formality of piano and string arrangements with the darker resonances of psychedelic brass, organ, and sparse percussion, the album’s expansive sonics enshroud Ashworth’s warm baritone in a rich technicolor landscape. 

As the intimacy of the album unfolds into ever-darker territory, it becomes clear that there is something here with a rare genealogy: something defiantly timeless, older than rock and roll. In weaving together the album’s grand themes – youth, death, and the perdurability of art –