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Ashe has made plenty of sad songs, but she’d never cried while writing one until “Funeral.”
Ironically, the ballad — the second single from her upcoming fourth album “The Girl of Your Dreams,” out Oct. 16 via Atlantic
Records — is actually pretty joyful. Despite its title, “Funeral” sees Ashe reveling in the comfort that comes from knowing you’ve found your person.
What begins with a simple piano melody soon builds to a bombastic, trumpet-led celebration inspired by New Orleans funeral marches. “You’ll be my Tuesday night and my Sunday drive/ And the last speech at my funeral,” Ashe sings in the chorus with a soul-twinged belt.
“Every love song I write ends up being so morbid. I don’t know why — I just think about death a lot and I think about love a lot and I think they are very closely intertwined,” Ashe tells Variety over Zoom from Nashville. She’s taking a walk to her favorite coffee shop, and the casual nature of the call along with Ashe’s knack for candid conversation makes our interview feel more like two friends catching up on FaceTime.
“Having a witness to your life is so meaningful and such a joyful thing,” she adds. “So this song starts out as like, ‘Oh, is this going to be sort of a sad ballad,’ and we’re like, ‘Nay, we’re going to be dancing by the end.'”
Ashe wrote “Funeral” — which is out now — with producer Noah Conrad, whom she first collaborated with on her 2019 breakout “Moral of the Story,” as well as songwriter Annika Bennett. “When we got to the bridge and I wrote, ‘Make it long/ Tell em every story and every song/ Say I found who I belonged to,’ I just wept in front of Annika and Noah,” Ashe recalls. “And then we all sort of got teary together and were like, ‘Love is what it’s all about!'”
Making “The Girl of Your Dreams” has been quite the full-circle moment for Ashe. Alongside working once again with Conrad, who produced the entirety of the record, Ashe found herself reflecting during the writing process about “Moral of the Story,” which she wrote while going through a heart-wrenching divorce. Now healed and happily married to musician John Canada, Ashe penned the album’s lead single “Stop the Wedding!” — a theatrical plea with her younger self to leave her prior marriage before it started — as the “older, wiser sister of ‘Moral of the Story,'” she says.
“It would have been the song that I needed so ‘Moral of the Story’ would have never had to be written,” Ashe continues. “But listen, I love that song, so it all goes the way it’s supposed to go. There’s such an overwhelming sense of gratitude for my life and where things are at — I’m not grateful for an abusive ex-husband, but I’m grateful for a story and for art that I am so proud of.”
This mindset has allowed her to let go and feel “less emotionally charged” around the release of the album, which is her first after signing with Atlantic. “It’s such a healed, playful, fun record — and I’m just in a place in my life where I’m very nervous system regulated,” she says. “It’s the first time in my life that I’m not super attached to the success of the thing. I mean, I’m also saying that at the same time that I’m having the biggest release of my career.”
Indeed, “Stop the Wedding!” has quickly become Ashe’s biggest solo debut since its release on Aug. 7. Within the first three weeks, it racked up 15 million Spotify streams and has become a top 50 trending song on TikTok, inspiring a trend where people share the reasons they left relationships as a warning to others.
“It feels a little like, finally!” Ashe says of the song’s triumph. “If there’s anyone who goes like, ‘Oh, what an overnight success,’ I get to really have pride in the fact that I’ve been doing this forever. Now people are pointing back to, ‘Oh my gosh, this is the same girl who put out ‘Moral of the Story.'”
She adds, “I really feel like I’ve arrived. And I’m like, good thing this didn’t happen sooner. It’s correct that ‘Stop the Wedding!’ is the song that’s changing everything.”
Ashe also loves the idea of the song being a wake-up call for people to “realize that they’re not stuck,” she says. Beyond the TikTok trend, she shares that a friend of her husband’s sent her a video of his 3-year-old daughter singing all the words.
“Like, imagine this little girl 20 years from now is being proposed to by the wrong person, or is feeling stuck in her job, or doesn’t know which major she should choose, or is being told to do something that isn’t right for her. And she has this callback memory to ‘Stop the Wedding,'” Ashe says, getting teary-eyed. “There could be an entire generation of girls that might be affected by this — like, what if we’re making the world a better place? And I just cried and was like, ‘Man, that is the whole point.'”
“Stop the Wedding!” has also set the tone for the visual world of “The Girl of Your Dreams” with an old Hollywood, Alfred Hitchcock-inspired music video directed by Silken Weinberg. Grace Kelly in “To Catch a Thief” and “Dial M for Murder” has been a big reference for Ashe, who wants to channel “this sort of softness about her that I really admire.” And it won’t be the only time we see Ashe on screen during “The Girl of Your Dreams” rollout.
“I don’t know what I can and can’t say, but there is a movie coming,” she reveals.
This cinematic, theatrical feel is at the core of “The Girl of Your Dreams,” which is more playful and whimsical than Ashe’s past work, drawing on ’70s influences including ABBA and Queen. “We were not trying to make a sad singer-songwriter record,” she says.
In fact, during the writing process Ashe was exploring the possibility of starring in a show on the West End. The timing didn’t end up working out, but “it was definitely something that kind of pushed me deeper into this very playful, whimsical, theatrical world,” she says.
However, don’t be surprised if Ashe channels the spirit of live theater when it comes time to tour “The Girl of Your Dreams.”
“I half think I should start it in curlers in front of a mirror, like slowly pulling them out for the first song or something,” she teases. “I can see it really unfolding as… not Broadway, but like a show.”
Ultimately, when it comes to this album, Ashe hopes that its eccentric spirit can provide a “soft place to land” for her listeners.
“The world is so miserable right now,” she says. “My heart for this record was like, ‘We need to add some whimsy into the world.’ And that feels like my calling right now.”
