This isn’t about the physicality of a person, because looks and appearances shouldn’t have any bearing on music. Shouldn’t is the operative word. With that said, everything about Ash Reiter is understated upon first glance. She was shy around us strangers, hushed and tentative when she arrived for a visit in San Francisco, where she was staying with her mother at the end of February during the time when we were there recording sessions during the Noise Pop festival. Reiter was one of those people not playing the festival that we felt deserved some tape. She walked in with her guitar and a calm look – just comfortable clothing, nothing that said she was a songwriter. There were no eccentricities to speak of – just a regularly fitting pair of jeans (who does that??), a ruby red shirt and a small, but noble pendant hanging from her neck. ... [Story Continues Below]

First song
Ex-Favorite One (Ash Reiter) [2.60MB] [768 downloads]


– unreleased
As a teenager, I was both terrified and obsessed by the idea of madness. Like many people, I romanticized mental illnesses, almost hoping to detect one in myself. It thrilled me that some strange thing could creep inside your mind and consume your way of knowing the world. My notions were deflated when I witnessed a close friend suffering from the first onset of bipolar symptoms. We had been very close and I saw how with a flip switch of genes how it could have easily been me. The image of injured bird flying through the world on broken wings looking for its nest seemed to capture the frustration my friend felt being lost in her own mind.
 

Second song
La Bahia (Ash Reiter) [4.32MB] [728 downloads]


– original version appears on Ash Reiter
My senior year of college, a bunch of friends and I all moved into a slummy apartment complex right across from the boardwalk in Santa Cruz. Like “Rear Window” I could look across the Spanish-style courtyard and see into all my friends’ rooms. I wrote this song on a day when it seemed like no one was doing anything worth distracting myself with. Partly it’s about being happy alone. The song was built around a line stolen from a Lyn Hejinian poem that goes “a fragment is not a fraction it is piece all on its own”. Otherwise it is my ode to La Bahia. Built as a hotel in the 1920’s and later used as an impromptu hospital for soldiers of World War II, it was full of history and charm. Though it was literally crumbling down around us, I think we liked to think of La Bahia as our broken palace. Once after a heavy rain storm I came home to find the roof to my bedroom in pieces on floor and when we moved in we all had to sign contracts promising not to lick or eat the old lead paint pealing off the walls. Still we all loved this place. It stood for something old something beautiful in its age and even its decay. Every year there is a rumor that they are allowing La Bahia go to ruin so it can be torn down and replaced by expensive beach condos. I am afraid one year soon the rumor will be true. Watching La Bahia slouch into disrepair makes me sad because I think of all the people who would be happy to see it finally fall, to see history replaced with the next new thing. Maybe I just like rooting for the underdog, but I hope history wins. 
 
Third song
Angie (Ash Reiter) [5.14MB] [692 downloads]


– original version appears on Ash Reiter
I suppose this is a requiem written for my best friends’ grandmother who passed away a couple years ago. Angie had been fighting cancer for a long time but was able to continue living in the home her husband built for her over fifty years ago. One day we were all sitting around the kitchen table and Angie told us the story of her rosary and all the mystical happenings that surrounded it. I was really touched and told my friend she needed to write the story down to remember as part for her family lore. I don’t think she ever had a chance to, Angie passed away shortly after our visit and when I found out I wrote this song. It mostly talks about the legend of the Lady of Lourdes since the rosary had been blessed with holy water from Lourdes and supposedly that was the source of its magic. I’m not really religious so when I talk about believing here it’s more in the sense of wishing for faith so miracles might happen to me too. 
 

Fourth song
Paper Diamonds (Ash Reiter) [3.31MB] [692 downloads]


– unreleased
I have a pen pal in Portland we hardly ever see each other in real life but we keep up through letters. The title to this song is inspired by a line from a poem he sent in one of his letters. Paper diamonds are all the things people make; ideas manifest in materials. I always think of the poems and songs friends have given me and how precious those are. The idea for the rest of the song is taken from Zora Neal Hurston. In “Their Eyes Were Watching God” she talks about how “When God made The Man, he made him out of stuff that sung all the time and glittered all over”. She says each person has a “shine” but we let other people chip down our light until it’s nothing but a tiny spark covered in mud. This song is celebrating that shine in people and suggesting that love can brighten it. 

Her soft face looked as if, during her earlier childhood years, that it could have contained a couple archipelagos of freckles – one on each cheek – that probably invited pinches from older ladies and gents who smelled like the Great Depression and cigarettes. She had/has hair that could have either been redder or blonder depending on the degrees and exposure in direct sunlight. She looked to have been genuinely happy – probably no matter what, no matter when. Then she has a beer – pretty sure she had a beer. She starts singing and that’s when you’ve got to realize that she’s been illuminated, a few times over. She’s done most of it herself and when she does, we’ll do the shaking – of our heads and of our skin, almost eerily right from its glue. She’s given herself all the permission she needs to just retreat into beliefs that she can gain something from, not be taken by. She’s allowed herself to think about things in a manner that is a little more spectacular than most – led by her curiosity and what seem to be listening skills to be envied. She’s gained knowledge from those who have seen more days, been amazed by what they believe in – blessed waters and guardian angels – and then made those thoughts and her own roommates in songs. She took the time to get to know her friend’s grandmother, hearing her speak about all of the miracles that she’d claimed to have seen with her own eyes – owing them to certain angels, of names that get directories of Catholic churches and schools named for them – and had the inclination to later offer this line in a song about the conversation or what she gleaned from it, “I’ve seen stars cut down to sparks and I have watched the angels tear the world apart,” making it her own. She allows doubt not only to creep in, but to take its shoes off and enjoy a nap on the couch in her sun room. She might even feed doubt when it wakes up – lemonade and cornbread or something else just as nice as a seeing its way to the door snack. To suggest that she’s seen angels tear a world apart is not par for the course. It’s an extension of something very analytical and probably more right. It’s an idea that could be supported by those gardeners and landscape artists who know the value in controlled burning to bring back native grasses and plants to an area that they’ve been ripped from. The complete, fiery destruction of the land can and will lead to invigorated growth and rebirth. Maybe that’s what those angels are doing. Reiter sometimes assumes that there is no ground control – a bird flying all day and night looking for a place to rest, no answers for the angels and their ways. Her voice holds likes a candle that sometimes catches a gust from a breeze – thrushing a couple of times with some flapping sounds as it passes – and then gets strong and orange again, standing erect and pointing toward the sky. She has a talent for being open to opening up and for just letting everything in through the windows to orbit around the bright bulbs or turn around and leave the way it came. She gets the experience and she dines.
 
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