The other weekend, I was walking past a row of restaurants in my town’s approximation of Chinatown. At each table there were families enjoying a quiet Saturday lunch—talking, laughing, gossiping. The scene made me feel slightly depressed in the knowledge that the scene was an impossibility for me. My parents live eight hours west of me, my sister lives eight hours south and my brother lives eight hours southwest. Weekend get-togethers aren’t easy to organise.

These families, half-glimpsed through glass, weren’t perfect. In my reflective moments, I have to recognise that they no doubt argue, bitch, and misunderstand each other as much as the next pack of individuals connected by genetics and shared holidays in cramped vans. But I curse them for being together—for having the opportunity to squabble and bicker in the same mediocre Chinese restaurant as each other.

This situation is one of my own making, the result of my own choices and my need to be independent and ‘going places.’ Overall, I don’t think those choices have been bad, but there are consequences. After you’ve been away for a while, you realise what you’re missing—that sense of belonging to something bigger than just yourself.

Which brings me to Casiotone for the Painfully Alone. I couldn’t tell you about electro-pop songwriter Owen Ashworth’s relationship with his parents, but going on his latest album as Casiotone, I can get a sense of where he’s coming from.

Parents feature frequently throughout Etiquette—Ashworth’s vignettes of twenty-something life paint pictures of a class of directionless youngsters, living in single-bedroom apartments thousands of miles from their families. Families are photos on bookshelves and voices on the end of static-ridden phone-lines. Sound familiar?

The narrator of “Young Shields” intersperses his musings on youthful disaffection with requests for money from his parents. The money isn’t forthcoming and he swears “to God they don’t get me at all.” Ashworth’s gruff talk-singing is full of pathos and angst.

In “Cold White Christmas,” a recent graduate seeks independence in St. Paul only to collapse into loneliness and pessimism. While there’s no one to scold or correct, she‘s facing up to a solitary Christmas. The glamorous single lifestyle she was promised has failed.

“Bobby Malone Moves Home” is almost a sequel to “White Christmas,” with a prodigal son returning to his father. Dad is so philosophical and reasonable, that it’s as if he never expected any other outcome. Bobby arrives, looking shabby and downcast, needing “a couple of months on the couch while [he] figure[s] things out.”

A review of Etiquette stressed that the importance of these stories depends entirely on your perspective—whether you share Ashworth’s sense that the lives of these people matter. Maybe that’s why I respond to these songs so much. They might not be universal, but their specificity hits home.

I turn 25 years old this week in a freezing-cold town miles from anywhere, in a house where I live with strangers. I’ll wake up, go to work and come home as if it’s any other day. Somehow I think Owen Ashworth might have written a song about that somewhere.

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