Owen Ashworth has announced his first (non-covers) Advance Base album in six years, Horrible Occurrences, due December 6 via Run For Cover (pre-order). Owen made the album in his home studio, and it takes place in a fictional town called Richmond, which Owen describes as “just this place where all the bad memories live.”
Owen as cited Bruce Springsteen’s Nebraska and Arthur Russell’s World of Echo as influences, and first single “The Year I Lived In Richmond” kind of exists in the exact middle ground between those two records, delivered–as always–with that distinct Owen Ashworth flavor. He says:
I’ve never lived in a place called Richmond. ‘The Year I Lived in Richmond’ describes my memories of a series of violent crimes that occurred in a city where I briefly lived in the early 2000’s. (Here’s a hint: it has the same cadence as Richmond.) I haven’t been able to corroborate the events through internet searches or conversations with old friends from that period of my life. Maybe I dreamt up the whole thing? I really don’t know. Over time, the events became a kind of personal mystery, and then that mystery became a song. The song took on a life of its own, a fiction more vivid than my hazy memories, with its own specific details and invented names. I’ve been living with some version of this song in my head for more than twenty years now and it finally feels like the right time to share it with you.
And about the painted music video, he adds:
I made friends with the painter Aaron Sewards around fifteen years ago, when his old band (I Know I Have No Collar) and my old band (Casiotone for the Painfully Alone) played our first of several shows together in Aaron’s former home of Bristol, England. Aaron painted beautiful watercolor posters for our shows. In the years since, Aaron moved to Japan and I moved to the suburbs, and thanks to Instagram, I’ve continued to admire Aaron’s watercolors from afar. A few years back, I asked Aaron to paint Little Sable Point Lighthouse, a lighthouse in Michigan that I wrote an Advance Base song about (it’s on the new album). Along with his lighthouse painting, Aaron sent a short animation of the painting in progress and it just looked like magic to me. I asked Aaron if he would make a full music video of animated landscapes for ‘The Year I Lived in Richmond.’ I loved the nostalgic quality of his landscape paintings and the way they seemed to conjure memories that felt simultaneously familiar and dreamlike. Aaron also shared my fascination with the Midwestern United States. His landscapes seemed like they would be a perfect match for a song about a middle American town that only exists in imagination. Aaron and I discussed each scene described in the song’s lyrics and I sent him some reference photos that I’d taken around my home in Oak Park, Illinois. Through the filter of Aaron’s watercolors, each image becomes a tangible location in the vague nowhere place of Richmond, the imaginary American town I describe in the song’s lyrics. The paintings become the memories of the narrator, coming into brief focus and then fading away again.
Check out the song and video below.
Owen also has tour dates coming up, including opening for Cass McCombs in Brooklyn on Wednesday (9/25) at Music Hall of Williamsburg. All dates are listed below.
Tracklist
1. The Year I Lived in Richmond
2. The Tooth Fairy
3. Big Chris Electric
4. How You Got Your Picture on the Wall
5. Rene Goodnight
6. The One About the Rabbit in the Snow
7. Brian’s Golden Hour
8. Little Sable Point Lighthouse
9. Andrew & Meagan
10. Premonition
11. Richmond
Advance Base — 2024 Tour Dates
09/24 Bethlehem, PA @ The Ice House !
09/25 Brooklyn, NY @ Music Hall of Williamsburg *
09/26 Philadelphia, PA @ Johnny Brenda’s *
09/27 Baltimore, MD @ The Ottobar *
09/29 Richmond, VA @ house show %
10/01 Durham, NC @ Duke Coffeehouse +
10/10 Milwaukee, WI @ Lilliput Records ^
10/11 Madison, WI @ Communication ^
10/13 Minneapolis, MN @ Cloudland ^
10/14 Omaha, NE @ Reverb ^
10/15 Iowa City, IA @ PS1 ^
10/16 Chicago, IL @ The Hideout &
12/06 Louisville, KY @ Surface Noise
120/7 Lexington, KY @ Green Lantern
12/08 Nashville, TN @ Drkmttr
12/09 Chattanooga, TN @ Woodshop
12/10 Knoxville, TN @ Pilot Light
12/11 Asheville, NC @ Static Age
12/12 Greensboro, NC @ Etc.
12/13 Chapel Hill, NC @ Local 506
! w/ william h. travis
* w/ Cass McCombs
% w/ Nicole Yun, Lamplight
+ w/ Moon Racer
^ w/ Katie Malco
& w/ Jake McKelvie, Mint Mile