Sarah Motes Ashley

I'm not sure when I threw myself under the bus. I do it a lot so it's hard to remember when I did to myself musically. I was trying to learn how to write for pop, for Nashville (ugh) and it seemed like if it sounded like a show tune, that was bad. Part of the problem was if you have a singer with vibrato, or a song with fancy chords, it bounces out of the ears of music industry folk and becomes unacceptable. Industry people are genre nazis. It's gotta fit into some box, or a box they just dreamed up so they can say the song doesn't fit. It's understandable: industry people are up to their eyeballs in possible songs every minute of the day, and they've got to narrow it down somehow. And vibrato sounds like the person who wrote it grew up belting "There's Got to Be a Morning After" (well, yeah) and that's very uncool. Anyway, when I first just wrote how I write and started letting industry people hear it, I got "it sounds like it could be in...

 It's the first song in the show, and it's the first song that's done and recorded.

 I was in a taxi in Vienna Boy that really sounds braggy but it's okay, nobody reads this blog. Anyway, I was in a taxi in Vienna and I got an idea for a musical. I made cautious inquiries, because when you have a big idea for a song or a play, it seems impossible that it hasn't been written yet. But it seems not to have been done yet. It is a big one. It's inspired by Stephen King and my son's misguided literature teacher and Hadestown and Wicked and a bunch of other things. Í'm excited and overwhelmed and I know two things. 1) I cannot write this thing by myself. Clarification: I could, physically, be able to write this thing by myself. But it's so lonely and awful to write a musical alone, the writing is okay but then weathering the production and the everything, is too hard. I promised. I swore to myself I'd never do it again. So I am putting out feelers and networking and praying and wishing I knew what else to do to find the collaborators.  Finding col...

I wrote it after it was like 80° on Valentine’s Day and I had just met someone in January so I used to introduce the song by saying that it was so unusual for me to have a boyfriend on Valentine’s Day that the entire climate changed. But now that’s not funny.

Sometimes I hate the South. There, I said it. I don't worry about repercussions. Nobody reads this blog.  I've lived in East Tennessee going on 16 years. It's beautiful, it's calm and people are mostly kind. It's not Deep South-y like Alabama. But it's the South. The thing I hate, today, is this relational collision that happens where people are hurt, or offended, or something, and they don't talk about it until somebody blows up. There needs to be a zippy name for this but I haven't the energy to think one up today. There are lots of sociological reasons why the South, or perhaps more rural places in general, are fertile ground for this kind of misunderstanding-based problem. I think it's a tribal fear of conflict, a fear of seeming uncooperative, troublesome, or different, and complete avoidance of the inevitable little irritants that come from doing life with other humans. It's complete, unhealthy denial that relationships can be work. Living ...

Criteria for the backlog project is kind of squishy. The whole point of it was to write things that needed finishing, record things that needed uke or guitar work (a.k.a. stealth practicing), and figure out why I don’t play some things out. This one is a song that is licensed in a lot of places but somebody played the guitar track really well on the recording. Which meant I was way too uptight to try to play it myself, but I got over that.