Fresh Squeezed: Mark David Ashworth

I know it is cliche, but like many of you out there I have attempted to begin the new year and decade with a renewed sense of purpose and drive. I have begun to devise ways to organize my many projects, focus on my writing, improve my health, and finally write down the goals that have been floating in my head for years. It may be foolish optimism, but I actually feel like I am going to accomplish something substantial this year.

A new album that has been on repeat in my office over the past week and through out all of this planning has been the sophomore release from the soulful and insightful Mark David Ashworth. Bright is the Ring of Words will be released on Autobus on Feb. 23 and contains countless moments of beauty and passion. Musically it appears dark at times, but it is the tender instrumentation that highlights Ashworth's poetic nature. The grand theme's of album are youth, death, and the perdurability of art, but he writes in such a way that it allows the listener to apply their quandaries to the mix.

There two moments on this album that seem to resonant more today then might in say June. The first is "Clean Slate" and its beautifully lush violins. Ashworth closes out the song with this, "the clean slate – in spite of the heft of all this passing time - keeps pace with all I create and digests it just fine." He talks about a fresh start while retaining all the pieces that you laid down in the past. The second track is "Copied His Face" where Ashworth talks about coping the face of a writer from a book at the library and carrying around this writers words and image in his coat pocket. I still haven't discovered why this feel so profound, but it is something that I have done many times throughout my youth. That is not to mention the track that is actually a poem by William Carlos Williams set to music, "Sometimes it Turns Dry and the Leaves Fall before they are Beautiful". In just his second album Ashworth has manage to capture the enthusiasm of youth, the panic in death, and the struggle of the artist a present it all on a bed of beautifully constructed tones.

Bright is the Ring of Words (Autobus, Feb. 23rd)

1. Disappearing Ink
2. Sometimes it Turns Dry and the Leaves Fall before they are Beautiful (mp3)
3. Keeping Things Whole
4. Pennies
5. Fountain of Youth
6. Daylight
7. Saturn
8. Copied his Face
9. Clean Slate (mp3)
10. Do it Anyway
11. Dark Continents
12. Bright is the Ring of Words