Right on Time: Angel White’s Ghost of the West Finds Its Moment

Angel White’s debut album, Ghost of the West, isn’t an attempt to reinvent the cowboy; it simply asks that we remember who he was. Not the mythic white loner of dime-store lore, but the often-overlooked figures who shaped the American West: Native, Black, and Spanish cowboys whose presence was erased almost as quickly as it was recorded and then co-opted by the John Wayne types. White doesn’t pretend he can fix that erasure, but in threading his own story through theirs, he opens a door and sings them through it.

The album was recorded in 12 days, a practical sprint that belies the long emotional timeline behind it. The album spans a decade of White’s life, condensed into a suite of songs that feel studied but never overworked. He arrived in the studio clear-eyed and surprisingly light, given the emotional weight of the material. “We knew what we were going in there to do,” he says. 

But intention doesn’t always equal ease. The song “Cigarettes and Alcohol” nearly broke him. Not melodramatically, just in the quiet, soul-shuffling way that happens when two lines refuse to show up and mean what they need to mean. He and his team circled them for hours. They gave up. And later, as often happens, the lines arrived alone, unhurried. White calls it growth. It might also be grief. Perhaps, grace.

One of the album’s most quietly devastating songs, “Red Blanket,” centers on the figure of White’s late grandmother. The track opens with the line “Black ink spells Emma Mae,” grounding the listener immediately in a world of memory and ritual. The red blanket itself, a real object from White’s life, becomes more than a keepsake. It’s a stand-in for care, for lineage, for the kind of love that persists in absence. Musically, the song leans into a dark, soulful Americana. It doesn’t perform grief so much as sit with it. White’s voice aches in the restrained way that feels truer than anything more theatrical. He isn’t pleading; he’s remembering. And that restraint only deepens the emotional impact. The sparse arrangement gives his vocals room to reverberate like the memories they carry. The red blanket is both symbol and evidence, tangible proof that love, when rooted in care and constancy, can cross time, distance, and even death. It’s one of the most emotionally direct moments on the album but also one of the most quietly complex. What do we do with the things we inherit, not just objects, but the echoes of someone else’s endurance? Here, White isn’t mythologizing cowboys or grandmothers or even himself. He’s showing how memory works: how it slips into song, how it loops back in on itself, how sometimes all that’s left is a name in ink and the weight of a blanket across your shoulders.

White talks about time often, but not with philosophical detachment. It’s something he wears. He describes “Running in Place”, the first track recorded, as a moment of eerie clarity. From that first take, he knew the project was happening on its own terms. Still, the album didn’t stop growing when the sessions ended. It lived with him, evolved in the quiet, like a thought you can’t finish but can’t quite drop.

Musically, Ghost of the West lives somewhere between soul and folk, drawing from Frank Ocean’s elasticity, Jeff Buckley’s ache, and Ray LaMontagne’s rasp. One of its more surprising moments, “Villain,” came together quickly, an effortless moment in a project full of emotionally laborious ones. It's a reminder that sometimes, clarity comes easily. Sometimes, it doesn’t. Musically, the track leans darker than much of the album, with a smoldering tension that feels cinematic without being showy. The atmosphere is moody but precise and catchy, drawing more from pop than from Western. It’s not outlaw music; it’s what happens after the outlaw sits with himself and looks inward.

White speaks of nostalgia like a haunting. “It’s the biggest human weakness,” he says. But there’s no irony in the way he leans into it. For him, nostalgia is a form of documentation, an internal archive of people and feelings that no longer exist but never stop happening inside you. Ghost of the West doesn’t shout. It lingers. It asks for attention, not applause. In doing so, it offers something that feels increasingly rare: a work of deep personal truth that doesn’t make itself the center. Instead, it becomes a vessel: one man’s reckoning with history, inheritance, and the strange, slow mercy of time.