[Cover photo credit to Rob Clarke]

British Producer and artist Fran Ashcroft has released his sophomore album The Songs That Never Were via Think Like a Key Music and a new video for the track “High Window”. Ashcroft has been the Producer behind dozens of albums over the past few decades.

The recently-released piano-based lead single “Waiting For The Britpop Revival” comes with a traditional A-side and B-side.

Longtime producer for artists big and small, and formerly of British Power-Pop trailblazers The Monos, Fran Ashcroft has recorded with some iconic artists, including Damon Albarn (Blur), Abbey Road Studios, Thunderbirds Are Go!, PRT Records and Studios, Spin Jupiter Spin (Dandy Warhols), Darling Nikkie (Lords of Acid) Big Fish Music in Japan,and Fruits Der Mer Records, to mention a few.

Ashcroft describes this album as “a bridge across time” and “a collaboration between myself and me of fifty years ago”.

Ashcroft shares about the record:

I’ve never made a record quite like this one. Nobody has. it was like building a bridge of time between my present day self and me from 50 years ago. The song I heard in my head at 5 a.m. that morning reminded me of one I’d written many years before, which I was never quite happy with.  I thought, you could almost put this new tune right over it. So I dug the old tape out of the archives to see if I was right. And I was – the chords were the same, and it was even in the same key! If I could only remove and replace the vocals on the old mono recording, it would be an entirely new song.

Were there other songs that could be treated in a similar way? Of course there were! I expected these new recordings  to be all be about using AI technology – but that was just a convenient tool, like any other. But this actually turned out to be a collaboration between my present-day self and me from 50 years ago – like some kind of bridge of time had been built between us. It sounds weird, I know – here, each song, whether an old recording or a new idea, was developed and transformed into something completely different from what it was to begin with – as if I were working with a co-writer and a quite strange one at times. But  music exists outside of time and this, I think, makes this record what it is.

Ashcroft also recently added author to his credits, publishing The Analogue Approach to Digital Recording last year via The Crowood Press. As a record Producer, he is best known for his less-is-more approach to recording, using the minimum number of microphones and tracks to get the best sound.