TAYLOR USED:
512

SONG CLIPS:
This Gypsy Soul
28k | 56K

Everything is Fine
28k | 56K

Ashia's creative journey has its roots in the rich travel experiences of her youth, during which she visited and lived in numerous countries throughout Europe and Asia. Her creative impulses found form in poetry, music, and painting, all of which coalesce on This Gypsy Soul (she also designed her CD's graphic layout). Songwriting has given Ashia a powerful medium of sonic imagery, and between her vocal dynamics and articulate lyrics, she sheds light on the risks, fears, pain and vitality that shape life. From her first exposure to a recording studio as a high school student in the Washington D.C. area to her subsequent travels as a musician, Ashia distills her material with honesty, and finds the way back to vulnerability even in the wake of pain.

Self-produced and arranged, This Gypsy Soul infuses rock's edge with the cello's haunting resonance as Ashia explores the price of being alive, and the tightrope walk between hopes and fears. She says goodbye to a love that has run its course ("Let You Go"), and later finds her heart replenished by new love and capable of soaring again ("Waking with You"). Other characters face doorways to a better place, yet struggle to make the passage. In "Everything Is Fine", a woman reflects on a 20-year marriage filled with betrayal and pain, and the lies with which she has paved over the realities instead of leaving. In "Brother John", the subject's soul slips into dormancy and the numbness of routine: "In your well planned life, each road's crossed with care, you hold the map tight in your hands, exact change for the fare." In the Russia-inspired "Spies (Can Never Go Home)", the subject "can't find the map to his soul and fears that it has been lost."