Ashe's path from burnout to bliss

An intense year of touring compounded an already intense string of personal life shocks — a mid-20s divorce, the loss of her brother to addiction — making muscling through the stress no longer possible. The rocket rise of her career as Ashe at the start of the decade with the viral success of “Moral of the Story” dovetailed with some of her lowest lows, but after waiting so long for her first turn in the big leagues, hitting pause wasn’t then an option.

“I wasn’t dealing with it,” Willson says, sitting in her Nashville home. “It was like… I was in the UK singing at the Royal Albert Hall with Niall [Horan] a month after my brother died. I knew it was a moment in my career to take advantage of, but I just paid no attention to my mental health.”

After packing roughly 70 shows into 2022, she realised she couldn’t get back on the road for her schedule the following year to promote her second record, Rae. “I just told [my manager] that we had to cancel the tour,” she explains. “I was like, I know I can’t do this. And I maybe can’t do this ever again.”

She gave herself seven weeks to recharge and to decide if she even wanted to keep going with her life as a recording artist. She thought about instead pursuing interior design — she renovated the entire house she’s currently talking to me from — or opening a coffee shop. As the self-imposed end date to her initial hiatus drew closer, she started to have nervous breakdowns. What she thought would sort itself out with a short breather ran far deeper. A real, full on career break was needed.

“I wasn’t taking care of the person underneath ‘Ashe'," she tells me. "I wasn’t taking care of Ashlyn. I genuinely didn’t trust myself to go back, write another album, do all this press, and go on tour in a way that I would not have another nervous breakdown."

Willson recounting the story of her burnout in some ways feels like hearing about far-off dream. She speaks with such poise and conviction that it’s hard to imagine she’s ever doubted herself at all. During our conversation, I gather that Willson is the type who, when she decides to do something, makes sure she does it right. If she’s giving you her time, she’s giving you all of it. In that way, it makes sense to me why th decision to continue with her music career after coming so close to a breaking point was such a drawn-out and weighted choice.

When we talk, she’s coming off a major high after playing Austin City Limits with her new band The Favors; a week after our conversation she'll marry fellow musician John Canada. “It’s a really fun season. But, you are catching me at an interesting time,” she says and laughs.

The amount of healing it must have taken Willson to get to this point isn’t lost on me as we speak. To be back on the grind of promotion, of touring, and of releasing after coming so close to closing the door on it must be a mind-warping kind of bittersweet. After what her 20s served her, for Willson to be entering this new phase with such vitality and grace seems, from the outside, like a miracle. It’s also a testament to her discipline and strength — particularly having the courage to slow down in an industry that favours exponential growth at all costs. Coming out on the other side with such a successful re-entry, Willson’s experience could even be seen as a case to combat the perverse notion that good art always comes with suffering. In her case, quite the opposite. One might even say her decision to prioritize herself and her mental health is the very thing that has allowed her best work to flourish.

“Honestly, it is one of the most exciting times for me for my life right now, both in my career and in my personal life,” Willson tells me. “Never in my life have things lined up the way that they’re lining up right now.”

There’s no question it’s been a big year-and-a-bit in the Ashe universe. Last September, she released Willson — her third solo record, the last of her 'name' trilogy, and her first independent project. This September, she joined Finneas O’Connell as The Favors and unveiled their debut The Dream. Both projects, she says, were deeply fulfilling in their own ways, and each have catapulted her to newer and bigger levels of success.

Though Willson was her first post-hiatus release, it was actually The Favors project that kicked off first — at least in theory. About a month into her break, she had a revelation: what if she didn’t have to do it alone? It was possible, she realised, that instead of a music career meaning pressure and isolation, it could be about community and connection. “I reached out to Finneas and said: ‘What if we made a record for fun?’ It was like, whatever we write, we cut. We don’t edit ourselves. We just write an album, we put it out, we play a few shows, and we call it a day,” she says.

He, of course, was in, and throughout April 2023, the pair started brainstorming. Both agreed they weren’t ready to jump in just yet — Willson still needed more time to breathe, and O’Connell was working on a new Billie Eilish record and a television score — but agreed to revisit it as soon as they could.

By this point, Willson had also left LA to move back to Nashville, the place where she’d started her career and the place she calls an almost “hometown.” Despite appreciating life in Los Angeles, she explains, it was somewhere she associated with bad habits and not taking care of herself. “I walk almost every morning to the same coffee shop, my baristas know who I am, and it’s very chill,” she says and laughs. “Everything is nothing too fancy or hoity toity.”

In October that year, the time finally came. Willson flew out to LA and stayed with O’Connell and his now-fiancé, Claudia Sulewski, for a five-day stint of writing and ideating. “We started working on the record then, but it was nice because it was a very gentle kickoff,” she says. “No one knew about it. Our managers didn’t know about our band, and my manager didn’t know about me writing again. It was all like, ‘Everyone keep your grubby little fingers out of the thing.’” For the spark Willson had found to sustain itself, she knew it had to remain intimate and pure for as long as possible.

“You do want people to show up for [your work] in that way, but if you let them in a hair too early, it becomes more about the success of the thing than the process or purity of the thing,” Willson explains. “I don’t know a single music artist who chose to do music for fame, success, or money. I don’t know a single artist in my circle that is that way. And I have very ambitious friends. I am very ambitious. But I think you have to be careful — at least while you’re creating — about thinking only about the result. If you’re only thinking about the Grammy while you’re making the record, there’s a really good chance that you’re making a shitty record.”

As an outsider looking at what The Favors and their record The Dream have become, I can clearly see the seeds of Willson’s early mindset coming to fruition. The project feels free, pulling from the effortlessness of 60s and 70s soft rock and spun into 21st century timelessness. Background laughs are left in the album’s final mixes, the arrangements are earthy, and press appearances are lighthearted. In sum, The Dream seems like a record that was pure fun to make, and The Favors seem like a band that’s pure fun to belong to. And despite the obvious, tedious grind that goes into any rollout of this scale, from the way Willson describes the experience, that impression is more or less true to form.

That ease is perhaps most apparent when the group are on stage together. O’Connell and Willson come out to each performance in formalwear, but they somehow always descend into playfulness. They — alongside Favors collaborators Ricky Gourmet and David Marinelli — are also always in total lockstep, the kind shared between blood relatives more than friends. “Finneas and I have been talking about this,” Willson jumps in as I mention this. “We definitely clicked into another gear in our friendship when we started promoting the record and doing these music videos and interviews, and it started to feel less personal. We were business partners, right? But there’s a unique moment — and it’s so needed for us — when we’re on stage when we’re put back in the living room singing with each other. It’s this very healing, important piece of the puzzle.”

Back around that piecemeal early work on The Favors — at the time, of course, the project didn’t even have that name — Willson also started writing for herself again, no strings attached. Like her sessions with Finneas, nobody knew. She’d had parts of a third album before her hiatus, but, like everything else, it got put on pause. The more she wrote, she knew she was officially getting back in the game. She built things back up slowly, in part because that was what she could handle and in part from necessity. In the run-up to Willson, she split with her longtime label, something she can’t tell me much about but says was very much for the best. Going independent, she now sees, helped her hone her vision and recommit to her craft.

“It was the right thing that I [took] that specific album, which came out of a season of complete solitude and healing, and [did] it on my own,” Willson tells me. In every sense, it was an investment in herself. She was paying out of pocket for everything, doing everything from directing her own videos to crafting her own digital marketing strategy. She found herself in her own basement signing hundreds of vinyl pressings, unwrapping, repackaging, and shipping each one by hand. As she describes it, she essentially bled into Willson. And if you’ve ever worked any kind of merch stand at a show, you know Willson isn’t being glib. Now, she jokes, when label reps come into her dressing room with a box of pre-unwrapped records for signing, she never takes it for granted.

But the sweat, she says, was worth it. The hard work itself was part of the ultimate reward. “I’m proud of [that album] in a really unique way. … In a lot of ways, it was very redeeming for me, because I came out of this pit and I said I wanted to do this again and I did it well,” she says. “It was as grassroots as it’s ever gotten for me.”

“I can stand on that stage knowing that, for ten years, I worked my ass off. I drove myself behind Lewis Capaldi’s tour bus. We did two nights at the Troubadour in LA where I was loading myself in and out. You know?” she says. The conviction she has now is the kind I imagine an Olympic athlete might, someone who knows what it’s like to be down at half time and claw themselves back up to victory. “I really can stand on The Favors album — or anything I do now — and see the success and be really proud of how hard I’ve worked for so many years for all of this. It makes you a better leader, a better person, a better songwriter, a better artist, a better friend.”

The Dream took shape in tandem with the release of Willson, and it grew increasingly clear that the quartet behind the project wanted The Favors to find an audience. In the weeks immediately following that first trip, none of what The Favors had become had been a major consideration. The whole thing had come together in chunks, a series of isolated visits that saw Willson, O’Connell, Marinelli, and Gourmet in O’Connell’s living room playing whatever they wanted. Marinelli and Gourmet had, at the start of the process, been O’Connell’s invites to the party, but by the end, they were as tight a pack as they come. “My memories of making it are the best memories I have of making an album,” Willson says. “It was just as wholesome and fun as it gets. … I mean, we made a lot of depressing, tortured records, but we were cracking up the whole time.”

“By trip three, we were letting people in on the secret,” she recalls, drawing the timeline for me. “We made one call to Justin Lubliner [the CEO of Darkroom known for signing and developing Billie Eilish]. He came over to Finneas' house, and we just played him music. We didn’t send a link. And he was like, ‘Cool, I’ll sign it. Let’s do it.’ The whole experience as a lot like you’d picture a movie going.”

The world the quartet built sits in Willson’s usual pantheon. She’s always listening to Carole King and Carly Simon, both influences that remained for The Dream. Beyond that, though, she also got deep into the work of classic bands like the Beach Boys and Simon & Garfunkel, watching how they matched harmonies and leaned on each other musically in their records. “I love the way they follow each other’s leads and harmonies, and you can’t always tell who is singing the lead and who’s singing the harmony. We really love that theatrical element of things,” she explains.

Since The Dream’s release, audiences have also speculated on Fleetwood Mac and Buckingham Nicks interpretations as well, but Willson tells me none of that was intentional. She suspects the comparison has come from a combination of a lack of male/female lead pairs in modern day bands and the groups’ shared timeless California sound. Regardless, she’ll take it. “Happy to be part of that legacy, if people want to put us in that realm,” she laughs.

Part of the success of The Favors, though, is that it was always meant to be a limited run. In this sense, Willson was able to put her all in the project with the comfort of knowing there was a date on the calendar for rest. A second album isn’t explicitly off the table, but it’s one of those things where it’ll only happen if it’s meant to. “I feel like I’m in a really healthy spot,” Willson says, reflecting on the close of this chapter. “It’s definitely the first time in my career where I’m experiencing success and not having a meltdown and there’s no crazy trauma going on. I mean, I’m getting married! That’s important. There’s a lot of joy.”

When I ask about how Willson feels about the future given all of this, she just smiles and replies: “I’m really excited to meet her.”