If there’s one thing I didn’t miss about social interactions, it’s that feeling of biting your tongue when you get cut off in a conversation, or hesitant about saying something too controversial. (Me? Yes!) Or maybe you find yourself in the room with someone you can’t fucking stand, but you have to play nice. Or, more likely, you’ve spent a year in a cocoon where you can’t say what you’re really feeling — I mean, what’s the point of complaining when literally everyone you know is in the same boat? Or a worse one?
So Anna Ash’s new EP Fire Season hits a lot of buttons. It’s a gentle, muted, confessional affair that mulls over missed opportunities to take a stand and get things off your chest. After her 2019 album L.A. Flame, an album as much inspired by groovy folk as garage rock, Fire Season feels like the morning after a big blowout. With clearer eyes and a cooler head, Ash is here to tell you all the reasons she’s upset with you — whether or not reconciliation can be reached.
Unsurprisingly, the standout song to me is the one with the pedal steel: “I Was Just Your Evening” muses about the ways our pain can block us from the people we want to love — or think we want to. Even as Ash is chewing some inconsiderate such and so out, her gentleness shines:
Everyone’s so sorry about your dad and all your stories
About the hand you keep on playing and the lives they get away with
But I knew as a kid that I wasn’t going to let it
Be a ghost or a scar that deemed my heart forbidden
And I wish that for you I hope somebody breaks through
In Fire Season, Ash hearkens to the permanent state of unrest we’ve all become all-too-familiar with. But that doesn’t mean it all has to be bad: even when you have to roll with the punches, something soft inside of you can — and should — be saved.