Released to coincide with his birthday, and organised by Dan Wriggins (of Friendship) in collaboration with Dear Life Records, You Were Alone: An Owen Ashworth Almanac is a covers compilation featuring versions of Owen’s songs from family, friends, labelmates and fans. A celebration which recognises a birthday but also so much more than that. A body of work and the burgeoning legacy it has and continues to establish, not to mention the blossoming community fostered through Owen’s label Orindal Records.

And community feels like the right word for the compilation. Both in terms of the gathered artists and the characters they bring to life. Because hearing the songs in different voices really brings home the diversity of personalities present across Owen’s work. Pedro the Lion adds a weariness to ‘My Sister’s Birthday’ with his distinctively gruff fondness. Claire Cronin is the perfect person to fully excavate the spookiness of ‘Pamela’. MJ Lenderman and Karly Hartzman raise a glass to poor old Christmas Steve. Sinai Vessel captures ‘Kitty Winn’ in all its sad affection.

Some, like Lisa/Liza‘s ‘Rabbits’ or Karima Walker‘s ‘Same Dream’, take the original versions back to the traditional folk roots, while the likes of Ylayali, Moon Racer and Bedbug lean into the electronic, harking back to earlier CFTPA days. What’s impressive is how the distinctive “Ashworthian” voice remains across the spectrum. Even the tracks with no literal voice, be it Robert Stillman‘s take on ‘Christmas in Nightmare City’ or Gordon Ashworth‘s extended guitar version of ‘Nephew in the Wild’, lose none of their ability to evoke the tales we’ve grown to hold so dear. Because while Dan might have intended to organise a birthday party, it turned out more like a reunion. A gathering of Owen’s characters, our friends. Still here, still living, still with so many stories to tell.

Cover painting by Martha Miller

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Entirely self-recorded, the album strives to create the most fertile conditions in which to explore one’s interior state, blending the lo-fi sensibilities of bedroom pop with elements of ambient to form the bedrock upon which Whit’s lyricism and spoken-word poetry can flourish. While the release is at least in part formed around the dissolution of a relationship, it inverts its focus, rejecting the traditional outward gaze of longing.

“The album is really an exploration into the body,” Jill Whit explains, “It’s about knowing yourself through solitude – gaining a connection to your physical body. It relates to opening up to your inner voice, and connecting the body and spirit through physical and emotional movement; to be ever accepting, shifting, breathing, living, being.”

Today, we’re excited to unveil time is being‘s first two singles, combined into one video by Shey Allen. ‘Touchless’ introduces the solitude of the record, crafting a space made dreamlike in the static aftermath of love. The only sensation is the phantom contact of those left behind, the only movement some residual disturbance that quietly pulls at the air. Whit’s poetry emerges plainspoken, deepened by the subtlest echo that plays like hearing your own words return from tiled walls. If there is coldness or solitude to the track, it is encapsulated in this resonance. The sense that, within such a scene, life can only arise from within.

Though written amid the dying embers of the relationship, ‘Maybe Means No’, is a natural progression from the previous track. Contemplating fleeing the present for new time and space, the song works up the courage to make a decision, growing brighter as it edges over the precipice of hesitancy into freefall. The drop might be sudden, the song suggests, and must be experienced alone, but there is feeling in such a descent. A reminder of your body—in gravity, in resistance, in sheer movement. A rekindling of possibility in the prospect of starting anew.

Through a solo dance performance from Rachel Andes, the video taps into this tactile sensibility and captures the contradictions running through the songs. Starting within the porcelain white confines of a bathroom, and concluding in a desert’s expanse of red rock. Surroundings that mimic the evolving soundscape, where intimacy and loneliness lose their firm divide, and physicality can triumph over empty space.

Cover photo by Joshua Doss

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