Five years after leaving Lawrence to take a shot a country music fame, Ashley Ray gets her break
Monday, January 22, 2007
Brace yourself for a familiar story, a Nashville story. A starry-eyed girl from middle America story, with humble beginnings and small triumphs and heartbreaks, and in the end the girl gets a major record contract. Brace yourself for a make-it-or-break-it story, clichés and all.
It starts like this:
Ashley Ray, the first of two daughters born to a construction worker named Rick and a UPS driver named Teri, leaves her country home south of town after graduating from Lawrence High School, suitcase in hand, and moves to Nashville, Music City, Tennessee, to make her run at country music.
Blessed with a powerful voice, Ashley idolizes singers she grew up listening to, like Tanya Tucker, Bob Seger, Keith Whitley, and the Judds. She’s been taking guitar lessons since fifth grade, and she’s made a name for herself in the local country music scene, having played festivals and karaoke contests since junior high.
To appease her mother, she has enrolled in a university she found in Nashville called Belmont—which happens to have a renowned music business program that she falls into. For a class project she has to interview someone from the music industry, and she finds Scott Kernahan, who at the time manages Lee Ann Womack. At the end of the interview, Kernahan asks why she came to Nashville.
“To be a singer,” she tells him.
He laughs out loud. “You and about 8,000 other people in this town that come every year.”
“I’m different.”
Sure, kid. She’s a pretty girl. She could have a pretty voice, too. No good.
“This town is filled with beautiful women with beautiful voices singing beautiful songs,” Kernahan explains in an interview. “Quite honestly, there’s just too much of that.”
Around this time, Ashley calls her mom. She’s been calling every day, and they’ve been sharing tears. For the first time, Ashley is learning what it means to be away from her grandpa and mom and dad and uncle Tom and sister Kelsie, who all believe in her but are 500 miles away.
This day, Teri is trudging through a long day at UPS. She’s driving the brown truck when she answers. She hears Ashley’s voice. She’s sick of the crying. Cue Mickey Mantle.
“Ashley, pack your stuff,” she says. “I’m coming down this weekend, and I’m getting you and I’m bringing you home.”
“Mom…”
“I can’t take it anymore. You’re breaking my heart every time I talk to you.”
The conversation is soon over, and the decision is in Ashley’s hands.
***
Teri never pushed her daughter. She gave her space, let her find music on her own. When Ashley wanted to take guitar lessons in fifth grade, Teri bought her a used $50 Hondo acoustic at a pawn shop, figuring she might last a couple of months.
Sometime later, she got a call from Ashley’s guitar teacher, Thom Alexander, a musician who’d recently moved from California. “You know, I hate to say this,” he told her, “but that guitar you bought was a piece of crap.”
From then on, it was nicer guitars and amps and a microphone and a karaoke machine. Her family found a way to get her whatever she needed to follow her dream. Into her bedroom these things went, but sounds could only be heard through the walls.
“She was so shy she wouldn’t let us watch her,” Teri says. “So we would sit downstairs, she would be above us, and we’d mute the TV so we could hear her.” (When Ashley went to Nashville, this was what Teri missed the most.)
Ashley’s friends started making her sing Mariah Carey songs from the radio at sleepovers.
“I think she probably didn’t want to sing,” says her best friend, Sarah Fisher. “But under the peer pressure, she gave in—as long as she could face the wall.”
***
A couple of days pass with no call from Ashley. Finally, Teri leaves her a message: “I hope you’re not mad at me, Ash, but this is hard on both of us. Continuing to do what we’re doing is not helping anything.”
Ashley calls back. “You’re right, Mom. I know that this is what I chose.”
She decides to stick it out, paying for school with student loans, surviving off the $100 her
grandpa sends her each month and a little money from her parents and a job she got as a cocktail waitress.
She plays around town where she can.
She lets Kernahan know she got an ‘A’ on the paper she wrote after the interview. Keep me posted on your career, he says.
She talks to her guitar teacher back in Lawrence every now and then, in two- or three-hour chunks. Before she left, he warned her about people who would try to take advantage of her with false promises. His New Wave band had two record deals fall through in the late '70s and early '80s. He advised her to cast her net wide and learn the business side of the industry.
“Don’t forget,” he told her. “The reason they call it the music business is because it’s not music. It’s a business. You have to understand that you’re going to get in there and you’re going to go swimming with sharks. It’s a few talented people and a whole lot of bean counters.”
***
One day when Ashley was in seventh grade, she shyly told Alexander she wanted to sing him a song she’d written. Teri had once asked Alexander to encourage her daughter to sing, but he hadn’t bugged Ashley about it. Then she opened her mouth. Where did that voice come from?
“She was making progress, you know, she wasn’t setting the world on fire as a guitar player,” he says. “But man, could she sing.”
Soon Alexander landed Ashley her first gig, as a back-up singer at a festival in Bonner Springs. The deal he made with the band was that Ashley would get to sing a song or two of her own.
“It was basically under this tent,” Ashley remembers, “and my family was there and that was about it. But that was the moment when I decided, ‘I have got to do this for the rest of my life.’ ”
Today, Ashley’s picture hangs on the wall of Alexander’s office at Americana Music Academy, 1419 Mass. St. He has another picture of her flipping the bird—an homage to Johnny Cash—laminated on the pickguard of his Gretsch Anniversary Model electric guitar, what he calls his Ashley guitar.
“She’s like my music daughter,” he says. “I’ve got one kid in the world, and then I’ve got Ashley.”
***
Ashley learns all about the bean-counting side of the music industry at Belmont. She studies subjects like publishing, accounting, and management. She also attends writers’ nights around town, where she and other songwriters perform their songs and critique each other.
She pesters Kernahan every now and then over the next year, letting him know how her career is going. He tells her there are a lot of talented singers in Nashville, and what separates the winners from the losers is hard work.
If you want to make it, he tells her, you’ve got to do this or that—keep up your guitar lessons, go to more writers’ nights. As time goes on, his advice gets more specific—work with this songwriter, go to lunch with so-and-so, etc. Everything he says, she does.
When Ashley has proven to Kernahan that she’s serious, he wants to hear her sing. It’s taken her a while to trust him after the horror stories she’s heard, but she sends him a link to “John Deere Queen,” a song she recently wrote about her sister for a John Deere compilation album.
He listens, but doesn’t hear the pretty, smooth country voice he expected. (“She don’t write them sissified songs,” her mom explains.) Whatever it is, Kernahan thinks, she’s got something that sets her apart from most of the female singers in Nashville.
On weekends she starts traveling the South and Midwest to play honky tonks, bars, and military bases, opening for hit country acts like Cross Canadian Ragweed, Dierks Bentley (whom Kernahan manages), and Miranda Lambert.
In December 2005, on her 22nd birthday, she signs a recording and publishing contract with Sony/ATV Tree Music Publishing. Things are going well. She’s finishing up school and writing songs for Sony/ATV Tree with plans to eventually put them on a record.
Then one day she has a meeting with company president Troy Tomlinson, and he questions her about her producer, a man named Jay Joyce who is more rock ’n roll than many Nashville producers. Maybe she should work with someone else.
“I’ll live in Kansas before I ever make a record that’s just like everyone else’s,” she tells Tomlinson. “I’m not like any of the girls here.”
He looks at her. “’Atta girl,” he says.
***
Kernahan was going to be in Lawrence for a Dierks Bentley concert, Ashley told her mom one day.
Wonderful, I’ll fix him a nice country dinner, Teri said. Well, there’s a problem, Ashley said. He’s a vegetarian.
“Oh, great,” she said sarcastically. They met at the Mad Greek.
On another visit, Kernahan went out to the farm.
“You can’t get cell phone service,” he says. “You can’t get any internet. It’s like, not an option. The cable modems don’t work out there. At night it’s pitch black and you can see all the stars.”
***
Ashley graduates from Belmont in May and quits her waitressing job to focus on songwriting. She works for Sony/ATV Tree full time, writing songs every day and waiting for a record deal.
Then, one day in August, her mom calls and tells her that her dad, Rick, has fallen in an accident and suffered head trauma. After a long struggle with alcoholism, he had been going through withdrawal. Ashley returns home and sees her dad in the hospital before he dies at the age of 49. Suddenly, she is without the man who had introduced her to the singers she had emulated as a kid singing into her hairbrush.
“He’s really the one that opened my feelings and opened me up to music,” she says. “He’s sort of the reason why I do what I do.”
***
A week and a half ago, about a year after she signed her songwriting contract, Capitol Records called: they're offering her a record deal. She calls Teri at work.
“Mom, I’m in Scott’s office,” she says.
“OK…”
“I’m in Scott’s office.”
“Something wrong?”
“No, I’m just in Scott’s office.”
“Why are you calling me and telling me that?”
A squeal: “Mom, I got a record deal!”
A hoot and a holler: “My daughter just got a record deal!”
Ashley tells Alexander, and he likewise is thrilled. Speaking in his office days later, he oscillates between caution—“the truth is, she may never have a hit”—and jubilation—“she’s going to be the next big thing out of Lawrence. She’s going to be the next big thing out of Kansas.”
This week, Kernahan and Ashley’s lawyer are ironing out the details of the contract, but she plans to start recording in April and finish during the summer.
“Then the real work starts,” Kernahan says. “Finding the first song to come out that kind of tells you who she is and what she’s about, and then shooting a video to go along with it, and then traveling around the country and meeting every radio station, and photo shoots.
“That’s when it gets tough
