The Haunting of Advance Base

The first time I meet Owen Ashworth, we’re at a potluck house show in early fall. In central Virginia, autumn arrives in fits and starts; there’s a cool rain mixing with the humidity off of the river, crickets humming around us so loudly that Ashworth comments from the garage-turned-stage that they sound fake. He’s standing alone up there, playing the “melancholic soft rock” he makes under the name Advance Base, with an impressive gear setup that his website describes as “a two-handed arsenal”: pianos, synthesizers, drum machines, samplers. From underneath a giant magnolia tree, I listen to him sing about Richmond—but not my Richmond. His Richmond, the one at the center of his new concept album Horrible Occurrences that’s entirely fictional: a made-up town filled with murders and ghosts, where he says “all the bad memories live.”

The second time we meet, it’s over the phone a month later, and I ask him about that night. Was it weird, I want to know, to be singing those songs in a real-life city with the same name as his fictional place? He laughs at this. Ashworth is an introspective and considerate speaker. It’s something that shows in the songs of Advance Base and his previous project, Casiotone for the Painfully Alone, which center characters from local handymen to teenage devil-worshippers with curiosity and grace. He has a knack for bringing these subjects to life with tiny, funny details that break your heart, sung over synths that linger like a forgotten track at the end of karaoke night. On “Brian’s Golden Hour,” from the new album, he considers a young skater in the aftermath of a life-altering botched stunt: “Watch, you’re crying in your chair, watching Jackass on your phone.”

Those songs and characters are also rooted in physical place, down to the cover of Horrible Occurrences, a painting by Ashworth’s great-great-grandfather that was given to him by his mother once she was “convinced” that he had settled down for good at his current home in Chicago. Ashworth calls his 2012 release A Shut-In’s Prayer his “Michigan album,” and 2018’s Animal Companionship his “Indiana album.” It’s a funny homage—both records lovingly follow their characters through towns and highways that a lot of them, frankly, seem to want to forget. His new release does the same, with distinctly higher stakes. There are several brutal deaths on Horrible Occurrences, run-ins with violent men and freak accidents that make the town itself feel innately hostile. Like his earlier releases, many of these stories are also inspired by somewhere Ashworth used to live, but he didn’t like the idea of projecting all of those morbid themes onto a real community. “Songs about some pretty dark stuff were coming together,” he explains. “It seemed like a pretty cursed thing to do.”

So he invented a place of his own, an “everywhere and nowhere town” just familiar enough that anyone can find a home inside of it. There are 29 places named Richmond in the United States, and more than half of the states in the country have one, one of the reasons Ashworth chose the name. In Richmond, Indiana, he remembers a giant water tower with the phrase “An All-American City,” a proud anonymity he finds striking. His primary world-building inspirations were Springfield from The Simpsons, Haddonfield, Illinois from John Carpenter’s Halloween, and Derry, Maine from Stephen King’s It; a series of blighted, imagined towns and a shared litany of violence and chaos that often stands in for other forms of pain.

It’s a funny thing, listening to an album about a town like this that has the same name as the place where you live. Months before Horrible Occurrences was announced, Ashworth released “How You Got Your Picture On the Wall,” one of the least violent tracks on the record, as a single. In it, a woman tells her partner a story about trying to shoplift tampons as a kid and winding up banned from a local supermarket because of it. While they’re home visiting, he steals the Polaroid of her off of the store’s wall of shame and brings it back for her, like a sweetly fucked-up version of an O. Henry story. The track name drops Richmond in the first line, and the similarities to Richmond, Virginia are striking: Kroger grocery stores, a location in the east, a prevalence of “anarchic and shy” teenagers. From March to September, when the full album was announced and its concept was explained, I wondered what kind of connection Ashworth must have to my city—only to learn the answer was none at all. “I’m so glad it seemed real,” he says to this, even though I’m a little embarrassed telling him about it. “That’s always the trick I’m trying to play with these songs, is that it feels lived-in, it feels relatable.”

To capture that feeling, Ashworth found inspiration in a very specific kind of kinship: the local lore about distant residents that seems to exist in every small town, and the “weird, eerie feeling” of hearing stories about people from your hometown who you’ve never met. “In high school, the way people would talk about kids who go to other schools, or kids who used to go to [your] school…is so much of the feeling I’m trying to put into the songs,” he says. “There’s a familiarity in the stories, but there’s this blank face to the characters involved.” I think of a story from where I grew up that my dad told me once—about a washed-up letterman who used to stay in shape by pulling a wagon full of bricks up the biggest hill in our neighborhood, like some suburban Sisyphus. It’s not hard to imagine one of Ashworth’s Richmonders driving past him.

That eerie sense of hometown is also at the heart of the holiday season. Because of its twinkling electric piano, a lot of Ashworth’s music sounds festive on purpose or otherwise, but there’s also plenty of explicitly Christmas songs in his body of work—he released this holiday canon as a mixtape in 2020, with the tags “nostalgia-obsessed” and “being at your parents’ house.” Its songs are also preoccupied by physical places, like Dearborn, Milwaukee and Oakland, California, populated by yuletide characters like the quirky cousin from “Christmas Steve” or the lonely post-grad from “Cold White Christmas.” At the house show in Richmond, Ashworth mentioned that the song “Christmas in Nightmare City” inadvertently shares a name with a 1980 Italian horror movie where a group of zombies land a plane and wreak havoc on a town—a surreal, cataclysmic homecoming. “I grew up feeling really paralyzed by Christmas music,” he tells me now. “It’s just such a loaded, emotionally complicated season.”

He does share a couple favorites, though: A Charlie Brown Christmas, John Prine’s “Christmas in Prison,” and Ruth Welcome’s Christmas in Zitherland, the last of which he credits with often inspiring the arrangements of his own songs. As far as his music goes, he likes to cover the holidays “in ways that aren’t about celebrating.” “The One About the Rabbit in the Snow,” Horrible Occurrences’ Christmas track, is definitely in this camp. Like Linda Bennett’s “An Old-Fashioned Christmas,” it’s about a man heading home from work to spend the holidays with family, but it takes a sudden turn. “It’s a very dramatic time of year,” Ashworth adds.

Just as there often is in Christmas stories, there’s a subtle element of the supernatural in the world of Advance Base—a quiet, Lynchian edge. It simmers just underneath the surface of Ashworth’s small-town stories, and sometimes, it bubbles over. He calls songwriting “an externalized version of dream interpretation.” On Animal Companionship, bizarre nightmares plague the central character of “Same Dream,” while elsewhere chance encounters with animals bring closure to human relationships, as if there’s some cosmic machination at work. 2015’s Nephew in the Wild makes the paranormal most explicit, with stories of a newborn Antichrist and a demon-summoning gone wrong. Ashworth considers Horrible Occurrences a kind of “spiritual sequel” to this album. “I love ghost stories,” he tells me. “There’s very literal ghosts happening on this record.”

The ghosts start coming early on Horrible Occurrences. On the opening track “The Year I Lived in Richmond,” a woman named Deborah Lee Hill (after Halloween’s co-writer, Debra Hill) narrowly escapes a serial killer by killing him herself, and then flees town overnight. This kind of inciting incident is another tradition in Ashworth’s songwriting. Every Advance Base album he’s released has started with someone making a sudden exit, a run of what he calls “dramatic departures” that leave the rest of his characters searching for answers. Before Deborah Lee, Trisha also packed up and left suddenly on “Trisha Please Come Home,” the opening track of Nephew in the Wild. A car crash destroys a blossoming romance on Animal Companionship’s “True Love Death Dream,” and a breakup argument drifts through the hazy memories of A Shut-In’s Prayer’s “Summer Music.” “Living suddenly with the memory of somebody,” Ashworth muses—“Where do you go from there?”

That preoccupation with memory haunts the rest of Horrible Occurrences in Deborah Lee’s wake, and it haunts Ashworth, too. “I just cannot rely on my memory as I’ve gotten older,” he explains. “I really am trying to tap into the subconscious and draw out the stories that I do remember, and try to figure out what about these stories has continued to haunt me.”

Also populating Richmond are some ghosts of his own experiences, like “The Tooth Fairy,” which is partially inspired by a real-life experience in Yellowstone with his oldest child. The track recounts a post-bedtime mishap that occurs when a dad goes down the block to get tooth fairy money for his daughter Melody: She realizes he’s not home and goes looking for him, just as he gets back to the house and finds her bed empty. There’s a deft trick to this song, perfectly capturing the childhood anxiety of not being able to find your parents at the same time as the adult worry of turning around for a moment and finding your kid is missing. Both fears prove unfounded when Melody and her dad find each other in the front yard, but the feeling of danger lingers. “You can just imagine the story going in a completely different path,” Ashworth puts it.

In line with this, he tells me he’s fascinated by artists whose body of work you can “look at and see a blueprint of everything that bothers them,” noting George Jones, Lucinda Williams and Bruce Springsteen as examples. Horrible Occurrences, in particular, reminds me of Springsteen’s Nebraska. Both albums are stripped-down and spacious—just as Springsteen’s harmonica echoes into empty silence, the keys on Horrible Occurrences are lonely and slow, a newly-sparse sound that Ashworth attributes to the influences of his friend and recent tourmate Karima Walker and Arthur Russell’s 1986 album World of Echo. “Especially for how brutal some of the subject matter is…something about leaving the words right out front felt appropriate,” he explains.

Ashworth’s small-town pantheon of characters is also Springsteen-esque, and so is the way Horrible Occurrences finds each one on the brink of their lives changing forever. When Springsteen characters reach these moments, their songs usually end on a moment of futile promise, stubbornly hopeful in the face of an ambiguous future. In Ashworth’s town, when things seem like they’re about to tip over the edge, sometimes they just…don’t. On some tracks, there’s a cautionary tale at work with these close calls, but elsewhere there’s just more ghosts. The characters on “Rene Goodnight” and “Andrew and Meagan” are left with another, stranger feeling than learning your lesson or facing the inevitable: of racing headlong into something that seems like a dramatic turning point, only to end up unscathed and searching for meaning.

That’s how we sift through memory, of course — looking for significance in the things that stick with us, and sometimes coming up empty. In It, Derry’s children narrowly escape their hometown and are flooded with terrible memories when they come back, forced to sit with the difference between what they remember and what they believe in. On Horrible Occurrences, something similar happens on the closer, “Richmond,” as a character comes home to make amends with a parent. “I’ve been so sad and angry, I know you’ve been too, but I can’t take the silence,” Ashworth sings, until the lyrics drop out and the music goes on. There’s no solution, either in the chord progression or the story itself—the track, and the album with it, ends on a cliffhanger as the narrator sees someone standing in the window.

In a way, the whole concept of a “bad memory town” hinges on that irreconcilability and what we do with it. People have “a real tendency to blame a place for bad decisions,” Ashworth points out. “There’s usually a very physical, geographical escape that happens with it.” His vision of Richmond is a profoundly haunted place, but through it, he explores how those ghost stories can be a defense mechanism—exorcising the way we make meaning from the past and the places we spent it in. We “think of a place as haunted,” he tells me, “instead of accepting that we grow.” I dare you to drive around your hometown listening to Horrible Occurrences, as I’ve been doing a lot in the last week. You’ll think about how haunted the familiar streets are, how much there is there, and you’ll think about the kids you knew growing up: the ones that left, and the ones that had bad things happen to them, and the ones you never actually got to know. But the ghosts you’ve attached to the place might confront you a little, too—and you might find yourself forgiving them.

Annie Parnell is a writer, radio host and audio producer based in Richmond, Virginia. Her writing has appeared in FLOOD Magazine, The Virginia Literary Review and elsewhere. Annie can be found online @avparnell and avparnell.com.