Interview: Ashley Campbell is headed to Newcastle
Moving from Nashville to London seems counterintuitive for a country singer, but that’s exactly what Ashley Campbell did at the end of 2023.
Her love affair with the UK started at the age of eight. Thirty years on, she calls it “home” and is preparing to tour the country on the back of a new album that wraps up the decade of life in Nashville that she left behind.
“I came here first when I was eight-years-old and it was amazing, then I came with my university when I was 18 for a theatre programme. But I’ve just always loved being here, and I’ve known for a long time that I wanted to live in Europe and the UK made most sense and I just love it here.
“Plus, most of my touring has been over here in the last decade, so it made sense to come over here full time.
“I love the culture, I love the way of life over here. I love how close it is to so many amazing places. In two hours you can be in Rome or Paris or Portugal. It’s such a cool thing for an American, because in the States, in two hours you can be in another state that kind of looks the same.”
Campbell cut her musical teeth touring the world as part of her father, country legend and actor Glen Campbell’s band.
But for the last decade, she’s been finding her own feet with solo work, as part of a duo with long-term collaborator and partner, Thor Jensen, and with the musical collective, Postmodern Jukebox.
She explains: “So, right out of college I started touring with my dad and I just loved all the travel, I loved seeing new places, I loved playing music, and so after the tour with my father ended, I moved to Nashville and started working with a lot of people, and doing a lot of songwriting.
“I had a publishing deal with Warner Chappell, so it was almost like going to songwriting university, because I was working with all these really well-known, amazing songwriters, almost every day of the week for the whole first year or two that I lived in Nashville.
“I lived in Nashville for about ten years and just kind of learned a lot of lessons, took some wrong steps, took some right steps, but I love where I’m headed and where I’ve ended up.”
Now she’s preparing for her first extensive tour with a full band, taking in Gosforth Civic Theatre, Newcastle, on Sunday, November 23.
“It should be fun,” she says. “Maybe it was 2023 or early 2024, Thor and I played up in Newcastle, The Cluny 2, but the first time I came up there was with my father, probably 2010 or 2011. We played The Sage at Gateshead, which was very fun, and I played there with Postmodern Jukebox as well.”
So, for the uninitiated, what should people expect from an Ashley Campbell show? Well, as she explains, the apple hasn’t fallen far from the tree, in terms of championing great talent.
“For my live show, I like to showcase musicianship, whether it’s mine, or my band members’. That’s what I loved about watching one of my dad’s shows, growing up, and from what I’ve heard, what he used to do in the 70s, he always loved to feature his band, and he liked to play with people, as opposed to standing in front of people.
“So, I hope people leave my shows with a sense that they’ve been a part of a collaboration, that we’ve all had this experience together, as opposed to me singing at them.
“The tour in November is a full band tour and it’s actually my very first band tour, because I’ve always done one-off shows with a full band, or like runs of three of four, but I’ve never done a full tour, like this. This is the entire month of November, going into the first week of December, in the UK and Ireland and I’m so excited.”
Alongside herself and Jensen, who she met when she enlisted him for guitar lessons, she will be joined by Postmodern Jukebox drummer Jack Amblin and Ben Nicholls, who she discovered when he was playing bass for Jessie Buckley, and who has worked with a range of artists including Jarvis Cocker, Seth Lakeman and Nadine Shah.
“I’ve got such a killer band, and I’m excited to put together a really well-rehearsed, cohesive show where we can just have fun and give an amazing experience to the audience.”
The tour follows the release of Goodnight Nashville, Campbell’s third solo album, a collection of songs from recent years that have come together to find a cohesive musical home for the first time.
“This album, I guess I would loosely call it a kitchen sink album because a lot of these songs have been written over the course of a decade, some of them as recent as finishing them in December last year.
“I just recorded the songs that I had written that I’d never got around to fitting on my first two albums, and they all started sounding really cohesive. A lot of it’s the same band, and I was like ‘you know what? I think I have an album here – I just need a couple more songs and I can craft that’.
“So, I called the album Goodnight Nashville, because it’s kind of like putting a little closing nightcap on my time in Nashville now that I’ve moved to London. And so it’s kind of like a celebration of everything I’ve learned there, all the friends that I’ve made, and friends that I’ve lost.
“Some of them I’ve recorded three or four times, but it just never clicked until this most recent time. Sometimes you’ve just got to keep working at it.
“But yeah, I think it really came together and it’s a nice farewell to that era of my life.”
Words: Paul White
Picture: Kate Kantur