Bringing Something Lovely to West Cork
About to embark on her Ireland and UK tour for her second album, country royalty Ashley Campbell, daughter of the late Glen Campbell, talks vulnerability, De Barra's, and getting back on the road.
Ashley Campbell is talking to me on the phone from her home in Nashville, Tennessee. She’s excited: the following day, she and her partner, fellow musician Thor Jensen, set off across the pond for the first time in a long time.
“Yeah, this will be my first real tour since Covid happened,” she says. “It feels like ages since we recorded the album, too; we recorded it at the end of 2018, but then it didn’t come out until October 2020, for obvious reasons, you know.”
The difficult second album: independence from the business
Ashley’s second album, Something Lovely, is everything you’d expect from country royalty; slickly produced, country tinged with bluegrass, but not too country to have broader appeal. Its selection of co-written songs combining a hefty dose of country tropes - heartbreak, bar hook-ups, wanderlust - with a thoroughly 21st century confessional style. And her voice, of course, is something very lovely.
“I wanted to make a record that harked back to the music I grew up listening to, and my dad’s era,” she says. “So there are some big string arrangements, some classic-sounding country, but also a pretty good representation of me.”
The singer, now 35, sees the independently released album as a maturation, a very different beast to her 2018 debut, The Lonely One.
“I like to see albums as a picture of how we’ve grown from one to the next and definitely I’ve come to know myself a lot better since the first album,” she says. “It’s a truer representation of who I am as a person and as an artist. My taste is becoming more specific, which is really nice.”
“To me, making this album was me setting out on my own outside of the music business. For so many years, since I moved to Nashville, it seemed like the focus was on success as opposed to on the music. I think you can get swept up in that, and I was fed up of it, so I just wanted to make something that I loved, regardless of whether anyone would like it. My dad always told me to create something that I loved, and that other people would love it too.”
There’s one older song on Something Lovely: Remembering, originally released in 2015, is a song about her father, and about his latter years, in which he suffered from Alzheimer’s.
Ashley is the youngest daughter of country superstar Glen Campbell and his fourth wife, dancer Kimberly Woollen.
Glen’s renditions of songs including Rhinestone Cowboy, Galveston and Wichita Lineman, and his virtuoso guitar talent (watch Alice Cooper reveal which rock guitarists wanted lessons from him) saw him sell over 50 million records in his lifetime.
The handsome crooner had eight children with four wives; Ashley and her full brothers Shannon and Cal are his youngest.
Famously, Glen was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s in his seventies, and set off on a global farewell tour; originally arranged as 12 dates, the star’s popularity saw this extended to an incredible 151 shows over two years, during which time his painful on-stage decline and descent into confused disorientation was charted for 2014 documentary I’ll Be Me.
Glen came off tour in 2012, recorded an album called Adios in 2013, and entered an Alzheimer’s care facility in 2014. He died at 81, in 2017.
“Music just kept pushing me in its direction.”
Ashley was alongside of her father for that entire farewell tour, which saw them do several dates in Ireland, including Cork, Killarney and Dublin.
“We went all over the place, but I don’t think we made it to Belfast,” she says. “We did that tour when I was around 23. I learned so much and got to see so much of the world, and it was really lovely spending time with my dad and with my family.”
Ashley originally tried to avoid a career in her father’s line of business, she explains: “I got really fascinated by musical theatre in Junior High and both my brothers were dead set on a career in music, so I guess I thought I’d do something different, but music just kept pushing me in its direction.”
“With just about every theatre show I got into in college, I was getting the parts because I could play and sing, especially in Junior year, when I was asked to learn to play the banjo for a play I was in; I just fell in love with it.”
Remembering was first featured on the soundtrack to I’ll Be Me. It was a soundtrack that would go on to win two Grammys.
But I’ll Be Me is tough watching: Glen’s growing confusion sees him stopping mid-gig in front of thousands of people, looking around him and asking, “where am I?”
Does Ashley ever regret how much of her father’s decline was charted in the public gaze? Did it ever feel wrong for him to be on stage during that final tour, like he should have more privacy?
“There were definitely moments on stage where it was pretty painful to see him forgetting, and to watch what he was going through,” she says. “But just the responses from the fans: people were so appreciative that he was there, trying. I thought that was a beautiful showing of the human spirit and the true appreciation for music, and for what someone has accomplished.”
“The fans were right there with us and I think on a different level, so many people in the world are going through exactly what we were going through as a family. For people to see someone of high profile going through the same thing as them, I think that can help them feel they’re not alone. So there were so many more positives than negatives about being public about his diagnosis.”
Bitter disputes in the public eye
Unfortunately, Glen’s estate was not settled amicably following his death, with a bitter rift between several of his children of former marriages and Kimberly Campbell and her children still existing to this day.
There had been a change to the singer’s will, to the detriment of his older children, in the mid-naughties, with insinuations that Kimberly had had an influence on this decision.
There were accusations that Kimberly had blocked some of Glen’s children from visiting him at the end of his life.
More recently, one of Glen’s children took exception to Kimberly’s 2020 memoir of life with the star, which revealed his struggles with alcoholism and cocaine abuse, amongst other revelations.
Again, these bitter disputes have been played out in the public eye. Mostly, for Ashley, they provoke a strongly protective streak in her towards her mother, she says.
“I just felt very protective of my mom. She handled the situation with so much grace; she just loved my dad so much, and wanted to make sure he was well cared for.”
“I mean, the stuff that was being said was absurd. If you meet my mom and know her for more than five minutes, you’d know that it is just absolutely crazy. I wish it hadn’t unfolded at all. My older siblings have had a tendency to be a little less than kind and it was just unfortunate, while we were all going through that, that they had to bring a little nastiness in, instead of just communicating.”
Vulnerability
In the album art for Something Lovely, there is a set of inspirational instructions that Ashley wrote, on what looks like an old-fashioned dance step diagram.
“Take your own vulnerability and wear it, proudly for all to see,”
One of these reads. I ask her about it.
“It just came to my mind when I was thinking about how to describe the spirit of the album in just one or two sentences,” she says. “That’s what came out.”
Is it one of the things she learned from her dad, from those final years of seeing him onstage confronting his own vulnerabilities?
“Well certainly, as a performer, nothing great ever came from hiding your vulnerability and pretending to be ok,” she says. “In society in general it’s often a question of keep a stiff upper lip and pretending things are ok but I feel like as a society we’re starting to become more vulnerable, more open about personal journeys. And I think it helps other people, just to be honest and open.”
Ashley is the curator of a fantastically glamorous Instagram account; she may have received her musical talent from her father, but she is physically far more similar to her beautiful mother, who had been a Radio City Rockette at the time she met Glen.
But she takes this comment about her Instagram with a little sigh: she’s been questioning the impacts of social media on our wellbeing recently. As well as it being now positioned virtually as a necessity for musicians who want to increase their profile.
“One thing that really bothers me is that in the music industry everyone says it’s so important to have a social media presence, when it’s nothing to do with making art or making music,” she says. “That kind of bums me out; they say, ‘to be successful you have to do this, this and this,’ and none of it is music, you know?”
“Finding a balance in that is really important to me. I’ve been trying to do just a little bit less; we don’t need that much information about everyone’s lives. I’m trying to live in the moment and not be scrolling on social media all the time.”
“The moment” includes working on a duet project with Thor as well as writing new material for her next album, and, of course, getting back out on the road and to the immediacy of live audiences on this side of the pond.
Not least of which, to Ashley, is playing De Barra’s in Clonakilty again, a venue she first gigged in 2019 while touring her debut album. She’s very much looking forward to her return.
“There’s something so beautiful about small venues like De Barra’s,” she says with enthusiasm. “First of all, I just love old pubs. De Barra’s is just so gorgeous, and the Folk Club is really special.”
“Last time I was there. someone told me that some people trust De Barra’s to have good music so much that they just show up; they don’t even know who’s playing sometimes. They’ll drive 50 miles to see a show. So some people discovered me that night, and other people knew it was going to be me. But I just thought that was so cool, how much people were there for the music.”
Ashley Campbell will play DeBarra’s of Clonakilty on Sunday, May 8 at 7.30pm. Tickets are available here.
For info on other dates, including Galway, Sligo and Dublin, or for the album, Ashley’s website is here.