Ashe was almost going to quit. The California-born singer-songwriter began her career singing on demos in Nashville, then providing guest vocals for EDM artists like Louis the Child in L.A. In 2019 she released a divorce anthem called “Moral of the Story,” which gathered the kind of forward momentum that signaled a potential breakthrough: a feature on a popular Netflix teen rom-com, a remake featuring a member of One Direction. Then things stalled, as they tended to do in the early 2020s. Two albums released on an indie label failed to boost her profile, and by 2023, burnout hit: She canceled her tour and considered retirement. A self-released album fell short of a comeback; an alliance with Finneas O’Connell produced a lukewarm collab project that aimed for Fleetwood Mac and landed closer to Daisy Jones & The Six. Then she signed a contract with Atlantic—one more chance at the big time.
TikTok embraced her theatrical single “Stop the Wedding!” with open arms. The song, in which Ashe imagines what would happen if she’d found a note from her future self warning her not to marry her ex-husband, takes every 1970s cliché known to man (Queen’s operatic maximalism, ABBA’s gleaming harmonies, Elton John’s drop-kicked piano) and blasts them at your face like a shotgun full of rhinestones. Front-facing camera commentators used the track in videos about leaving harrowing relationships, deploying its hook as part of a broader trend on red-flag avoidance (“if he forces you to marry him because you look like his dead wife, stop the wedding” goes one Resident Evil-themed clip). Thousands of videos later, “Stop the Wedding!” is a bona fide streaming hit, and a second chance for the 33-year-old artist who seems to have narrowly escaped getting chewed up by the song machine.
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Ashe has dabbled in vintage aesthetics on and off since her 2021 debut, Ashlyn—a record you might describe as “Tove Lo in Lauren Canyon” or maybe “Carole King takes a 10 mg edible”—but in the wake of breakthroughs for retro-minded artists like Olivia Dean and Laufey, it finally feels like her approach to confessional songwriting has a secure place in the pop world. Ashe’s prior album, the intense but uneven Willson, ended with a moment of abject insecurity (“Will any of this matter?/Will any of us matter in the end?”), but she arrives on The Girl of Your Dreams in fighting shape, unafraid of a syrupy string section, a bout of Broadway-style belting, or even a hand-waggling key change. The allusions are pretty overt: “Stardust” is a hazier version of Fleetwood Mac’s “Dreams,” and “Lasso the Moon” has a distinct “Don’t Go Breaking My Heart” flavor. Still, the songs are so tight, confident and catchy, it’s hard to turn up your nose at their indebtedness to past eras.
Other than a couple lines about lovebombing and iced lattes, the lyrics feel pointedly timeless, with broad, universal imagery (the moon, the sun, the weather, the seasons) and a circular narrative that starts with Ashe as a regretful bride and ends with her having found someone worthy of marrying once more. Of course, she’s thinking all the way ahead to the speech her new husband will one day make at her funeral: “Say I found who I belong to/And the best thing I ever did was loving you.” If her current Marilyn Monroe hairdo didn’t tip you off, Ashe’s idea of romance is pure Hollywood, each breakup and make-up augmented with special effects and stretched to the widest of screens: She’s constantly falling into reveries about oceans at night and gardens at dusk, and memories of her ex give her chills even in a Chicago heatwave.
The slower numbers on deck are particularly charming. “Sunburn” is a nice stab at a Great American Songbook tune, and “Always September,” which has the emotive piano and strings of a Harry Nilsson sobfest, is so pleasingly melodramatic that it makes me wonder if Ashe might someday move past the ’70s and try her hand at ’80s power balladry. Everyone wants to be Buckingham/Nicks, but who among us will dare to take the path of Jim Steinman?
Sometimes the theatricality gets to be a bit much. “Swan Lake,” for example, undercuts its subtle abstraction of the plot of Swan Lake with a chorus that literally goes, “This is Swan Lake,” and “Sweet Caroline,” a bland reproach of a “girl’s girl” turned frenemy, does not earn its Neil Diamond allusion. But considering Ashe was hanging by a thread in the industry just a couple years ago, the sheer jubilance of her music is endearing, and her assurance is strong enough to brush past the missteps. This is an artist unwilling to take half measures and unafraid of cringe. At a time when some pop stars are hiding behind flat affects and hibernating until spring, Ashe has committed to whimsy.
