Ashton Nyte

Ashton Nyte is a South African-born singer, songwriter, producer and author, best known as the frontman of the alternative rock band The Awakening. Nyte has released eight solo albums and two books, in addition to twelve albums as The Awakening, as well as several other projects and collaborations. He is considered to be a pioneer of alternative music in South Africa, and has been described as "something of a musical genius" for his typical method of composing, playing and recording each instrument himself on most of his releases. Nyte is widely known in South Africa for his chart-topping cover of Simon and Garfunkel's "The Sound of Silence", "Maree" and several other top singles. His signature style combines baritone vocals, garnering comparisons to David Bowie and Johnny Cash, with instrumentation that ranges from lyric-driven acoustic folk, to alternative rock, to post-punk and electronic music, as well as a penchant for the theatrical. Nyte has been based in the US since 2009. Quotes They can expect mass hysteria akin to Beatlemania. And that’s just me: that’s how excited I am! [laughs] I’ve been playing and touring in a solo capacity on an ongoing basis, but this is the first proper full band Awakening tour in nine years, so we’re excited. The new [self-titled] album came out in October last year, and there have been a few albums before that that have filled in the gaps between our last tours, so you can expect a lot of new songs, and of course the old favorites, as well. We’re currently sewing up our stage outfits to try and look absolutely beautiful for everyone, so you can expect that, too. I’ve always said that I suffer from a compulsive songwriting disease, where I just literally can’t stop doing it. I love the process. Honestly, it’s how I express myself. It’s how I figure out how I fit into the world. It’s how I try and understand relationships between things. And I just think that there’s never going to be a shortage of inspiration to do that. That, and I’m inspired by so many different artists, by so many different art forms. One of my favorite directors this Ingmar Bergman, so I could sit down and watch a Bergman movie, and then go and write an album afterwards, based on whatever I’ve just seen. I love poetry and literature. At school, my strongest subjects were English and Afrikaans. Afrikaans is my second language. As a South African, going to school when I did, that was the second language we learned, and we would learn a third language to some degree, an African language. But we kept English and Afrikaans through my whole school career. So I was writing poems in my second language at the age of seven or eight. I think there’s a fascination with how words work, and the power of the written and the spoken and the sung word. Growing up as I did and when I did, I think many South African authors and poets and writers influenced me, and ultimately shone a light on alternative ways of thinking about the country and the way things were, and my place within that. External links Category:Living people