OWEN ASHWORTH has written songs about bank robbers, obsessive recluses, and small-town riot grrrls. In his songs, Ashworth’s characters have fallen in love outside of punk shows, wrecked cars, had abortions, written suicide letters, and celebrated Christmas in a wide variety of disheartening ways.
“A lot of the characters in the songs will be kicking around in my head for a while before I figure out the right way to tell the story,” says Ashworth, the Chicago songwriter behind the Advance Base moniker. “It’s sometimes years before the very basic seed of an idea ends up as a finished song.”
For most of the last 20 years—13 of those as Casiotone for the Painfully Alone and six as Advance Base—Ashworth has created curious portraits of fictional lives. His songs are most commonly odd tragicomedies that seem to share little with typical approaches to songwriting.
“Writing is a very visual thing for me,” Ashworth says. “When I was young and I imagined doing creative things, making movies was the thing that was most attractive to me. I guess songwriting kind of came out of that—[for me] it’s very character-based, very situational.”