Ashley Pitre

My first experience hearing Ashley Pitre sing was about a year and a half ago. I understood that she and her sisters came from a musical family (their parents were in "a terrible eighties band called 'Dangerous Times,'" Ashley would tell me later), and her mother is still a working musician. Having never heard her--or her sisters--sing before, and knowing only of their talents through reputation and word-of-mouth, I found myself really looking forward to it.

With influences like Nora Jones, Joni Mitchell, Ricky Lee Jones, and Sting, I really wasn’t sure what to expect: Joni Mitchell has inspired a share of copycats. Ashley's only accompaniment was the acoustic guitar that nestled, loose and comfortable, on her lap while she sat cross-legged and totally unprepossessing on the floor in my good friend’s living room. I had asked her if she wouldn’t mind playing a song or two for me.

She is a natural performer, and obliged me.

Her voice is husky, clear, and mellifluous. In times of comparison, we are often called upon to hold the object of comparison to the mirror of nature. Ashley’s singing is not the strident crash of surf breaking, and it doesn’t crackle or roll like burning wheat. Rather, it is wind whistling across the mouth of a cave, the keen of loon, a pussy-willow brushing a downy forearm.

Ashley sings with restraint, personality, and a subconscious harmony that murmurs just beneath the immediately aural; it is implied, like the notes in a good wine that are not tasted. Most of all, it resonates with the kind of natural clarity and immediacy that puts technical vocalism to shame.

Her songwriting tends to deal with the internal dialogues between the self and the other. Elephant Shoes is a gentle, Juvenilian jab at a former lover: “Cold were your hands today / I couldn't laugh it all away / Won't you try to be a little more gentle tonight?”, and the speaker’s struggles with the divine, in King Me, the centripetal symbolism revolves around a surreal dialogue with God: “This floor, it goes on for miles and miles / I laid the tile, black and white checkered / King Me.”

She laughed a little self-deprecatingly at her lyrics, and says that a lot of them “don’t make any sense,” but in the several times I’ve enjoyed her singing and conversation, I’ve noticed her emotional sophistication and sensitivity. These tools will undoubtedly develop her songwriting, lyricism, and natural musical intuition and aesthetic as she develops and grows with her almost year-old son, Micah. If anything, any weaknesses one might find in her technique are only indicative of the reservoirs of natural talent that are already being brought to yoke.

Ashley Pitre is a performer who, should you give her five percent of your trust, will repay the forfeit of your investment. But will be your loss should you miss her performances.

- Ian Poschenrieder, September 25, 2007