Change Your Listening Habits, Change Your Life
“No one wants to be part of a generation that ignores another van Gogh”
"Many music critics have compared him to the likes of Tom Waits and Nick Cave but he's having a completely different conversation. It might be more prudent to compare his songs to a Lynch film." Daytrotter
After years of whetting the knife in the American Southwest desert as a lyrical Billy the Kid, Ashley Raines now composes his music with the surgical precision of a Midwestern Nick Cave and the experimentation of an early Tom Waits. Ashley Raines is a singer-songwriter, multi-instrumentalist and composer who’s been chronicling the dark underbelly of Americana for two decades. He uses his literary influences to tell timeless stories of good and evil, battle cries and ballads wrung from the precarious position of man, as he tries to let a bit of humor shine on the dark wanderings of his mind.
“The lyrics are dark, really dark. Nick Drake and Vic Chesnutt dark but it is what Raines does best.” –Clint Wiederholt, Vocals on Top
Raines escaped his early life as a teenage runaway, scarred from juvenile incarceration and homelessness. He set out, traveling the country trying to find a place where he could stand.
While incarcerated in a juvenile prison in Kansas, Raines would hear “Vincent” in his mind, the 1976 song by Don McLean about Vincent Van Gogh, as he looked out barred windows. Was he suffering for his sanity?
“There is no great artist in all art history who was as ignored as van Gogh, yet people are still afraid of missing the van Gogh Boat.” The Radiant Child, Rene Ricard. ArtFourm December 1981
From street performer to straying it in Hollywood, Raines began touring in the late 90s and would go on to perform more than 150 concerts annually. He’s released albums with variations of his band The New West Revue over the years. One Trick Mule, After the Bruising and It Could Be Worse—a mix of folk, country, blues, jazz, and rock-n-roll—from stripped down, live in the studio with three acoustic instruments to fully-produced with layers of electric guitars, drum beats and synths. Raines finds depth in the simplicity, in the slow, never fully fitting into any one category, he’s always straddling genre lines, never quite landing on any one side.
"Ashley Raines is a keen observer of the age-old struggles between sin and everything. His deep and cutting voice is one that you could find yourself hearing when no one else is around. He might be your internal monologue." –Paste Magazine
Before the COVID-19 lockdown, Raines released Gutter Mansions, an eerily prophetic album about isolation in a world we no longer recognize. Rodeo Queens was released in 2020, a collection of country/folk love songs featuring an angelic trio of female vocalists, and his latest, The Halcyon Face released in August of 2022, songs raised up from the past with new life breathed into them. Raines drifts between country and blues, taking interesting turns into Spanish and Middle Eastern sounds. There’s a quiet, albeit dark and intricate openness to this album.
I didn’t miss the boat. I’ve been sailing the seas since the first night I heard Ashley Raines sing in an old mining town on the Turquoise Trail in Madrid, New Mexico. I’d go on to listen to the same five songs for over two thousand miles. People always say “music changed my life” but quite literally Raines’ voice (and the shrooms I ate the night before under the starry, starry night) ushered me into a whole new form of existence.
To be continued…