No songwriter is ever off duty. And for the US pop singer Ashe, that included her wedding day.<\/p>\n
Last October, she was getting ready to tie the knot at a gorgeous hilltop ceremony in Nashville when inspiration struck.<\/p>\n
As she watched her family gather, the musician flashed back to her first wedding, almost a decade earlier. The contrast was stark. <\/p>\n
She’s called that first marriage “horrifying”. Her ex, who she met in college, was, she says, emotionally manipulative and psychologically abusive.<\/p>\n
He had insisted on a beachfront wedding, which sounds romantic until you learn that Ashe has a fear of the ocean.<\/p>\n
In the run-up, she had been tempted to call it off, but felt powerless to stand up for herself.<\/p>\n
On her second wedding day, she realised the opposite was true.<\/p>\n
“I’m in a happy, healthy relationship and I have total autonomy over my own life,” says the singer, now in her early 30s.<\/p>\n
“I thought, if this didn’t feel right, I could totally put a halt to the whole thing. I definitely didn’t have that first time around.”<\/p>\n
As she adjusted her veil and prepared to walk down the aisle, she filed that feeling away. <\/p>\n
Two months later, and back at work, the idea resurfaced and a song spilled out.<\/p>\n
Its name? Stop the Wedding.<\/p>\n
It unfolds like a movie scene. Ashe pleads with her younger self to trust her instincts.<\/p>\n
“You know how you really feel \/ You don’t have to waste your life,” she sings, as the wedding band stutters to an uncertain halt.<\/p>\n
“Do I wish I’d had that advice at the time? 1,000 per cent,” Ashe says.<\/p>\n
“If someone had given me the insight that I was not stuck, and that I could run, I could have changed things sooner. Maybe not at the altar. Maybe weeks before \u2013 but it was something I really could have used.”<\/p>\n
What about the line where she pledges to “burn the wedding dress and run away”?<\/p>\n
“I didn’t burn my dress,” she laughs, “but I did get into a bathtub with it for a photoshoot right after I left my ex-husband, which really ruined it!”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"No songwriter is ever off duty. And for the US pop singer Ashe, that included her wedding day.…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":797646,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[32],"tags":[6491,96,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-797645","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-celebrities","tag-celebrities","tag-entertainment","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/797645","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=797645"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/797645\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/797646"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=797645"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=797645"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=797645"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}