While on tour with The Mission’s Wayne Hussey during the fall of 2019, Ashton Nyte found himself playing stripped down, acoustic versions of a predominantly plugged-in catalog of music spanning 25 years and nearly 20 albums between his musical project The Awakening and solo material. Upon returning home to St. Louis, the South African-born artist was still drawn to the lack of big production and arrangement around the previous live setting that he started exploring some older tracks that would fit this environment, while newer ones flooded in for what would become Waiting For A Voice (Intervention Arts).
His seventh solo album, Waiting For A Voice is Nyte’s most exposed deliverance. Stripped of electric and darker waves, it fills a deeper folk-fused void that Nyte has somehow evaded until now. Flawlessly poetic in its lyricism, Nyte opens a chapter of his life that is intimate, reflective, and enlightening, traversing childhood inspirations, a spiritual and mystical connection to nature, and how everything somehow comes full circle.
Enveloped in a cinematic sweep of acoustic-driven arrangements, Waiting For a Voice is delicately weaved around Nyte’s textured storytelling and lush vocals from the opening slow build of the title track, a gentler ebb and flow of “Ocean Song” and “This Isolation, and Nyte’s melancholic balladry of “Has Anybody Seen My Love.” Drifting into “I Asked for Nothing” Nyte reflects And as the truth needs pain for comfort / We talk in rhyme just to prove we believe / Out in the shade of none but the desert / I asked for nothing / And you gave me nothing / So just let me be. Every word and phrase is fully concentrated throughout Waiting, from the darker brood of “Time (Just Before The Light Got In)” and “Soon It Will Be Morning,” or the gypsy folk of “Disappear,” through the more haunting, piano-led “Awake” and closing swell of “Icicles.”
“The new album is very much where I am now on so many levels,” shares Nyte. “Once I had written the title track, the floodgates opened, and everything came out. It felt like a realization of a dream or a desire that had been brewing for the last 10 or 15 years.”
Tina Eves 