Oakland singer/songwriter Asha Wells’ gorgeously glistening chamber pop song “Gift Horse” invites us to revisit the loves we’ve lost with open eyes and an open heart, revealing how even our most painful regrets can deepen our appreciation for the fleeting beauty of having loved at all. Arriving November 13, Wells’ sophomore album ‘Sleeping Sand’ carries that searching spirit into a richly textured, radiantly dreamy world where personal longing collides with the demands of everyday life.

Stream: “Gift Horse” – Asha Wells

It’s hard to leave the past behind when it sounds this gorgeous.

Ravishing, radiant, and profoundly moving, Asha Wells’ “Gift Horse” gazes back at a former love, tracing the questions that surface once the moment has passed and the choices can no longer be remade. Wrapped in glistening piano, lush brass, and gently jazzy rhythms, the Oakland artist’s stunning single is an intoxicating work of art folk and chamber pop – dreamy, intimate, and utterly all-consuming. Its beauty draws us in; its lingering uncertainty keeps us there.

Wells’ piano moves with a dulcet grace, each phrase given room to linger, while Zachary Elsasser’s gentle but steady drumming keeps the music in motion. Jason Kick’s bass adds depth to the arrangement, as Wells’ own trumpet and Lizzy Dutton’s violin enrich the song’s sumptuous, enchanting atmosphere. And then there’s Wells’ voice – soft, stirring, and mesmerizing in its restraint, caressing each lyric as though they’re singing to someone sitting right beside them. Everything unfolds with an almost hypnotic fluidity, the instruments gathering around the singer and opening outward in waves of sound. It’s a spellbinding balancing act, intimately rendered yet wonderfully expansive, and through it all, the music seems to wash over you like a half-remembered dream.

Risk it all, for one bite
I missed it all, I missed the whole night
Crying in my car, is this what loves like?
Don’t look a gift horse,
Don’t look a gift horse in the mouth

High on those red pills you brought
From up above the west bridge
If I’d gone where i said id go
Would I be with you still

Beneath that exquisite arrangement lies a much more complicated picture of love.

“Risk it all, for one bite / I missed it all, I missed the whole night,” Wells sings, before arriving at the bruising question, “Crying in my car, is this what loves like?” The title’s familiar proverb, a warning against scrutinizing a gift too closely, takes on an uneasy significance here. What happens when we accept love without questioning its terms? When the beauty of what we’ve been given distracts us from the things we ought to have seen? Wells revisits the past with an awareness that only distance can bring, searching through its memories for the moments when everything might have gone differently.

“If I’d gone where I said I’d go
Would I be with you still”

The question is devastating in its simplicity. Two lines are enough to conjure an entire alternate life, one in which a different decision might have kept two people together. Later, Wells wonders what honesty might have changed, singing “If I was honest from the beginning / and called a duck, a duck.” There’s an extraordinary tension between the sweetness of the music and the painful clarity of these reflections. Hindsight has given the narrator a new understanding of what happened, but it also invites them to imagine the possibilities that slipped away. The song lives inside that contradiction, holding the joy of what once existed alongside the regret of what might have been.

As Wells tells Atwood Magazine, “‘Gift Horse’ is a final fleeting glance at a once love. Lyrically alluding to what goes unquestioned in our lives. A returned glance towards a former love. Dallying in a slice of life romanticism. A picture of unapologetic reflection, and the clarity that hindsight can bring.”

Released August 11 via Anxiety Blanket Records, “Gift Horse” introduces Wells’ forthcoming sophomore album, Sleeping Sand, arriving November 13.

The follow-up to their 2023 debut Water Words, the new record reaches into the subconscious, trading its predecessor’s stream-of-consciousness approach for a more patient, purposeful examination of memory and experience. A classically trained vocalist and self-taught instrumentalist, Wells produced the album alongside Jason Kick at Santo Recording in Oakland, bringing together a talented ensemble of collaborators to realize their richly textured musical vision. “Gift Horse” offers a breathtaking first glimpse into that world, its intricate arrangement and wandering reflections suggesting an artist increasingly at ease with the space between instinct and intention.

The longing at the heart of “Gift Horse” takes on different forms throughout Sleeping Sand. September’s haunting, jazz-tinged single “Jacob Sheep” draws from pastoral and biblical imagery to confront impermanence and the difficult art of letting go, while November’s yearning, piano-laced “Scaffolding Sky” examines the strain that work and everyday obligations place on our most intimate relationships. “There’s a bird in me that itches for the ocean,” Wells sings on the latter, capturing the longing for freedom that runs beneath its reflections on responsibility and self-doubt. Together, these songs suggest that Sleeping Sand is concerned as much with the lives we’re living as the ones we might have lived – the choices we revisit, the pressures we endure, and the possibilities that remain. With the album arriving November 13, Wells’ music seems poised to illuminate the complicated spaces between what we desire and what life demands of us.

The other singles offer glimpses of the larger questions Sleeping Sand will confront, but “Gift Horse” brings those concerns into the intimate aftermath of a single relationship.

By its final verse, Wells’ focus seems to shift from the life that might have been to the love that was real, however fleeting.

Since you called a single hour
I had to watch you lose a life
Doin’ good is good, better is better
Don’t look a gift horse
don’t look a gift horse in the..

High on those red pills you brought
From up above the west bridge
If I’d gone where I said I’d go
Would I be with you still
If I was honest from the beginning
and called a duck, a duck
for nothing else was i so willing
just to write a name in the dust

Perhaps the most affecting moment in “Gift Horse” arrives in its final image: “just to write a name in the dust.” It’s a striking expression of love’s impermanence, of how willingly we give ourselves to people and moments we can never truly hold on to. A name written in dust is destined to disappear, but the act of writing it still matters. There’s such extraordinary beauty in the way Wells honors that fleeting devotion, allowing their voice and instruments to linger over a memory that time has already carried away. “Gift Horse” is a mesmerizing, deeply stirring experience, a song that invites us to revisit the past with open eyes and an open mind, embracing all the beauty and pain that hindsight reveals.

And for a few precious minutes, Wells gives a love that has faded one last chance to bloom.

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Stream: “Gift Horse” – Asha Wells

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 © Curtis Z. Austin

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