The Malden resident’s new album is far more than merely satisfying or impressive under the circumstances — he suffered a major stroke in January 2016.

Corin Ashley with Modern Day Idols. The Plough and Stars, 912 Massachusetts Avenue, Cambridge, MA, May 26 at 10 p.m.($5 / 21+).

Singer and multi-instrumentalist Corin Ashley. Photo: Liz Linder.

By Blake Maddux

I recently very fortunate to speak by phone—although I have also done so in real life—to musician Corin Ashley. And I mean “fortunate” in more ways than one.

While his two decades on the Boston scene as a member of The Pills in the late 1990s and early 2000s and as a solo artist since, Ashley makes a fine interviewee. More important, however, is the fact that I was conversing with a singer and multi-instrumentalist who had suffered a major stroke in January 2016. That he was perfectly able not only to communicate with me but to do so about the new album that he recently released was rather spectacular.

“Having a stroke is just a stunning experience,” Ashley declared in a phone interview. “I started to realize that my fingers no longer moved and my voice was really screwed up. I thought, ‘Well, I’m done with music, I guess’.”

“The other thing is,” Ashley continued, “it was a pretty big stroke and they’re kind of waiting for another to hit, and in a lot of cases another one comes along and a lot of times it takes you out.”

Interestingly, the last gig that Ashley played before his stroke was an opening spot for Dave Davies (click for Brett Milano’s Arts Fuse interview), the Kinks guitarist who had himself recovered from a stroke that he had in 2004.

“He was such an inspiration afterward,” Ashley said of Davies, with whom he continued to communicate. “It’s very clear when you see someone who has had a stroke and lost the use of their hand and they fought their way back, you can’t help but think, ‘I suppose I can do this too then. I just saw a guy who did it, so it must be possible to do’.”

The Malden resident’s new album is called Broken Biscuits and is far more than merely satisfying or impressive under the circumstances. It might very well prove to be the crowning achievement of a career that by all indications still has plenty of fuel left in its tank.

“There’s a big hodgepodge that influenced different sounds on the record,” according to Ashley.

This hodgepodge manifests itself careening Faces-like hard rock (“Little Crumbles”), sparkling Beatles-esque ditties (“Edison’s Medicine”), and Midwestern American power pop à la Cheap Trick and Shoes (“In Appropriate Fashion”). In covering not only all of the bases but also the outfield and the pitching mound, Ashley also cites Electric Light Orchestra, Eels, and assorted practitioners of “contemporary psychedelic music”—e.g., The Butterscotch Cathedral—as influences on his latest effort.

In crafting this follow-up to 2013’s New Lion Terraces, Ashley solicited the services of both erstwhile and new collaborators.

“My regular drummer Matt Burwell played on most of it,” Ashley explained. “I recorded it at Q Division and at Zippah mostly, so those are guys I work with a lot. The first Pills demo was done at Zippah, and so it was kind of nice to get back there.” (Pills guitarist Dave Aaronoff also plays on the album.)

Casting his net a bit more widely led Ashley to record a few songs at Ardent Studios in Memphis, which in turn afforded him the opportunity to have drummer Jody Stephens (click for my DigBoston interview) of the legendary band Big Star play on two tracks (“Magpie Over Citadel” and “Broken Biscuit #6: The Cookie Crumbles”).

Furthermore, Tonya Donelly (click for my Arts Fuse interview) of Throwing Muses, 50FOOTWAVE, The Breeders, and Belly provides vocals on “Wind-up Boy,” a song inspired by the book Tik Tok of Oz, one of the several sequels that L. Frank Baum wrote to his most famous work.

Ashley met Donelly at the Paradise Rock Club following a Hot Stove Cool Music benefit concert.

“Tanya and I ended up backstage talking,” he recalled. “I don’t know how we got around to it, but by the end of the night we were kind of holding hands and singing Yoko Ono songs together.”

Having written “Wind-up Boy,” he realized that it needed a little something extra:

“I was thinking, ‘it’s such a mechanical-sounding song that it really needs some human blood and guts in there.’ And I was thinking Tanya would be the perfect person to do that. She took the song to a whole other place, I thought. Made it like a whole other level of good. She sings like an angel, you know.”

Finally, while the inspiration of Lennon and McCartney is abundantly clear pretty early on (“I would never in a million years deny The Beatles as my most obvious influence,” Ashley proclaimed), that of George Harrison is subtler and less direct.

How so? Ashley’s 11-year-old son Harrison, who is named after the quiet Beatle, sings along with his old man on the “Hey Jude”-ish fade-out to “Jellyfish.”

“He wants it known that he would like another take and he could do it much better if he had another chance,” the proud father declared laughingly. “He had to be a diva about it!”

Blake Maddux is a freelance journalist who also contributes to The Somerville Times, DigBoston, Lynn Happens, and various Wicked Local publications on the North Shore. In 2013, he received an MLA from Harvard Extension School, which awarded him the Dean’s Prize for Outstanding Thesis in Journalism. A native Ohioan, he moved to Boston in 2002 and currently lives with his wife in Salem, Massachusetts.