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Jun 24, 2021 By Caleb Campbell Photography by Christine Hucal

Michigan-born and LA-based singer/songwriter Anna Ash is back this week with her latest EP, Fire Season, releasing June 25th. Coming shortly after L.A. Flame, her 2019 full-length album, and Oldies, her 2020 EP, her latest EP was recorded under COVID isolation at Eli Crews’ home studio in the Catskill Mountains, building out the personal and reflective elements long present in Ash’s music to new heights. Ash has already shared a handful of new singles from the record, but she is now back with one last taste of the EP before it releases, “What the Light Can Do,” premiering with Under the Radar.

With “What the Light Can Do,” Ash crafts a song of gently rising beauty and barely controlled pain. Singing in a gorgeous trembling twang, Ash contemplates God, riches, and her future, questioning her path but finding small comforts in simple joys like the morning light shining through the window. Ash’s pastoral guitar passages and contemplative vocals are further filled out by twinkling piano lines and swelling gospel vocals, adding warmth and presence to the cold isolation of the track. The result is a stark and beautiful reflection, an honest expression of Anna Ash’s heartfelt sorrow and hesitant hope.

Ash says of the track, “I think of “What the Light Can Do” as a reflective snapshot of a single moment, when all your boiling points are hit at the same time, and you’re left just staring at the dumb sky again talking to a god you barely know. It touches on the pressure to hurry up and do everything—get the house, get the kids, do it all perfectly, while also trying to be present, alive, bold and honest with yourself.”

“I grew up fairly poor in a rural area. We lived in a trailer for a while, we were on food stamps. And now I live in Los Angeles, still poor, but surrounded by wealth and with access to all of the upper-class amenities. Sometimes I get so dark that I haven’t made better choices to get myself to a more stable financial place, but you meet so many miserable rich people in cities like this that, as I get older, it’s becoming easier and easier to just accept that I love the light on my bare living room walls in my crumbling cheap old house.”

Check out the track below and watch for the Fire Season EP, out tomorrow June 25th.