Music Review: Ricky Asch Releases His Latest ORIGINAL Song & Shows Us All He Has A FOOL'S HOPE

Heigh Ho, dear lovely rainbow tribe, welcome back to Bobby’s CD sandbox where we offer our broken-down breakdowns of new music releases. So, strap in and get ready, as Bobby goes on the record ABOUT the record.

This week’s music entry in the BobbyFiles comes from multi-talented multi-hyphenate, Ricky Asch (aka Ricky A. Schroeder) a very hardworking actor-singer-dancer-choruscutie

(for now) who recently added recording artist to his hyphens (click here & read Bobby’s review of his cover of LIKE A STAR) and, just last week, moved into full creator mode with the release of his own original composition FOOL’S HOPE. For a number of years now, as Ricky A. Schroeder, Ricky has been building up a career as a performer, slowly paying dues and putting bricks in the wall of his creative life with theatre, film/TV, podcasts, stripping for charity dollars with Broadway Bares and some pretty fun RickyToks showing life with his hubby and his cat, Shady. He is a Horror FREAK who lives for the fall weather and the promise of Halloween, which brings us to FOOL’S HOPE. The lyrics are Ricky’s own free-form poem, where he chooses simple rhymes (all, wall, fall, etc.) but the images he weaves are dreamlike and haunting. The Fool is the card in the tarot deck that represents new beginnings, having faith in the future, improvisation, and believing in the universe - again all necessary POVs for the artist. For cover art on the song, Asch and his people created an image of a new Fool’s card with Ricky's ginger hair on the young traveler, and they replaced The Fool’s dog with Shady - awwwww.
 

Asch has a wonderful tenor voice that he tamps down a bit for this song, opting for the intimacy of the mic in relation to our ears, keeping it soft, and drawing the listener in. There is urgency in his voice and in the driving tempo that adds to the song's unavoidable dance-floor feeling. The song is hot just as it is, but with the work of a fine DJ, it could very well mix into something with the potential to set the floor on fire. Ultimately,  the story of this one, with all its tarot/fortune teller imagery, is about struggling to attain. One must imagine that, for Asch, this original song mirrors the actor’s struggle to “scale that wall” for even a modicum of success… OR the singer OR any artists fighting for a place in the profession/s they practice... such as, in this case, Asch, who has been working hard across all creator titles in this new world of the social network and has, now, landed in the garden of songwriter/recording artist. PHEW - we’re exhausted just thinking about it. In the end, it is that “fool’s hope” that sustains and leads one to find one’s place.

From the synth keyboard opening with a harsh arpeggio leading into a beat that is totally dance-able, this is a song with a message AND a party that is just fun, all around. There is a bit of a pastiche painted over this one and it is reminiscent (at least to Little Bobby’s ears) of some of the early 2000s club kid music one heard in the original run of QUEER AS FOLK. It’s not old-fashioned, but there is a call out to things Asch would have heard as a young gay. 

Overall, if you follow Asch on his socials, see him on stage or screen, and take in his creative work, what you will see is the profile of a creator as defined by his generation, but with the sticktoitiveness that his dance and theatre training has given him to play the long game of an artistic life. Will FOOL’S HOPE do it for him?  We feel sure people will dance to it and that should be enough, and so…

This one gets 4 Out Of 5 Rainbows

Put this one in your Amazon stream: HERE

You may Stream FOOL’S HOPE From Any Other Preferred Service: HERE

You Can See And Hear Everything About RIcky Asch (aka Ricky A. Schroeder) On His Webbysite: HERE

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