On February 28, 2020, Canadian singer-songwriter Taylor Ashton will release his debut solo album The Romantic on Signature Sounds. Heralded for his "rich, compelling voice" (Exclaim! Magazine), Ashton released four albums of heady progressive folk with the Vancouver-based Fish & Bird before moving to New York City in 2015. After the move, he wrote hundreds of songs and made his living as a subway busker among other things, slowly eking out a space somewhere in the fertile space between the Brooklyn's roots scene and its adventurous indie-rock community. In 2018 he released "Been On Your Side", a duo album with grammy nominated songwriter and guitarist Courtney Hartman, which Rolling Stone called "stark one minute and lovely the next ... old-school folk songs that still pack a punch in today’s mainstream", and over the years his songs have been recorded by Benjamin Lazar Davis, Watkins Family Hour, Laura Cortese, Rachel Baiman, The Brother Brothers, and others. For a solo debut, The Romantic is wonderfully collaborative and finds Ashton working with different players from song to song. Ashton writes, "The album is like a supernaturally good party - the musical conversation flows naturally, different people come and go who bring different energies but it keeps a consistent tone." Thematically, The Romantic is a document of Ashton's identity as an expatriate Canadian living in the U.S., "processing change and loss and seeing the beautiful painful passage of time, from twelve different angles." With his solo debut, Ashton brings his wide-ranging and richly textured folk-pop to a larger audience, appealing to an equally wide-range from fans of traditional old-time music, to fans of Harry Nilsson, Joni Mitchell, and Bill Withers.
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