A Blast From the Past

We here at The Circular Narrative love finding new music, but it's not beneath us to take a look back at the albums that got us to where we are now. Thus, today we bring you look back at an important album in the lives of many.

Taking its name from a children’s nursery rhyme, Andrew Hollingsworth’s seminal Star Light, Star Bright album is widely considered to be the third best album produced by the Tufts Ultimate program after Jay Clark’s “Aeroplane” and Stauss’s freestyle in a Danbury, CT parking lot. But let’s not be superficial with rankings.

Legend has it that the album was recorded using just a MacBook built in microphone and GarageBand, but the listener would never be able to tell. Hollingsworth also declined to tune his guitar, saying “being in tune is for pussies.” We couldn’t agree more.

Lyrically, Hollingsworth is lightyears ahead of his contemporaries. While other kids his age were busy drinking Svedka and hooking up in the backseats of their parent’s minivan, Hollingsworth spent his days penning the songs that would define said kids childhoods. This is befuddling given Hollingsworth’s romantic prowess, as detailed in the power-ballad “Rosa.” He croons, “This is a letter, that’s long overdue/ the address postmarked, the first line reads ‘Dear You’.” Damn. Hollingsworth is playing so hard to get that he is openly admitting to not knowing a girl’s name in a letter to said female. The listener is further left to wonder how Hollingsworth obtained the woman’s address, given that he doesn’t even know her name. Additionally, one can't help but ask why he simply did not just facebook chat message her, given that he is on facebook roughly 22 hours a day.

This mystique is what makes Hollingsworth’s music so successful. It is unpretentious. It is universal. It is a little creepy, (“Top 5 reasons to write a song tonight/ sweetie, you are reasons one through five.”)  It is a soundtrack to the part of life that most of us forget about; when we were simply stumbling through adolescence trying to find our identity and hoping that people had forgotten about the time we wore pink sweatpants to school in 3rd grade.


A common theme throughout the album is the idea of the misunderstood artist. Hollingsworth is transparent in his artistic process, which allows the listener to see deep within his tortured soul. He broods, “instead I stayed home and wrote this song/ and you went down to Puffer’s pond/ you went swimming with your friends/ and it seems like this is the end.” Cryptic. Depressing. Beautiful. Andrew Hollingsworth.