Ashe was too scared to cancel her wedding - the story became a hit song

No songwriter is ever off duty. And for the US pop singer Ashe, that included her wedding day.

Last October, she was getting ready to tie the knot at a gorgeous hilltop ceremony in Nashville when inspiration struck.

As she watched her family gather, the musician flashed back to her first wedding, almost a decade earlier. The contrast was stark.

She's called that first marriage "horrifying". Her ex, who she met in college, was, she says, emotionally manipulative and psychologically abusive.

He had insisted on a beachfront wedding, which sounds romantic until you learn that Ashe has a fear of the ocean.

In the run-up, she had been tempted to call it off, but felt powerless to stand up for herself.

On her second wedding day, she realised the opposite was true.

"I'm in a happy, healthy relationship and I have total autonomy over my own life," says the singer, now in her early 30s.

"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."

As she adjusted her veil and prepared to walk down the aisle, she filed that feeling away.

Two months later, and back at work, the idea resurfaced and a song spilled out.

Its name? Stop the Wedding.

It unfolds like a movie scene. Ashe pleads with her younger self to trust her instincts.

"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.

"Do I wish I'd had that advice at the time? 1,000 per cent," Ashe says.

"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 – but it was something I really could have used."

What about the line where she pledges to "burn the wedding dress and run away"?

"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!"

Released in August, Stop The Wedding this week became one of the 10 most-played songs in the world on Spotify.

On Friday, it broke into the top five of the UK singles chart, while on TikTok, thousands of videos use Ashe's song to highlight red flags in their own relationships.

"I don't think I even let myself dream of this," she says of the song's popularity.

"It's something you hope for when you're first starting out, but when you've been in the business for 10 years, it's a little bit of a shock to the system."

The success is even sweeter because, three years ago, Ashe nearly quit music altogether.

A native of San Jose, she grew up in a conservative household where the radio was permanently tuned to Christian stations.

It was her grandad who introduced her to rock music, playing Tom Petty and Bob Dylan on long road trips. By her teens, she was writing her own music.

After studying orchestral composition at Boston's Berklee College of Music, she moved to Nashville and quickly found work as a songwriter.

She scored an early credit on Demi Lovato's 2017 song You Don't Do It For Me Anymore; but slowly grew frustrated that other people were singing her words.

The decision to become Ashe, whose full name is Ashlyn Rae Willson, didn't happen overnight. She appeared as a featured vocalist on a handful of dance tracks before plunging into a solo career.

Her then-husband was not impressed.

"I remember him saying, '[After this] no-one's ever going to love you for you. Anyone you meet now is going to meet you as Ashe, and I met you before'.

"It was truly manipulative, and it kept me stuck. It kept me stuck for a long, long time."

It can't be a coincidence that a song she wrote after signing her divorce papers became her breakthrough hit.

Moral of The Story (key lyric: "you can think that you're in love / when you're really just in pain") was released in 2019, and hit one billion streams after appearing in the hit Netflix series To All the Boys: PS I Still Love You.

Ashe was suddenly playing bigger venues and duetting with Niall Horan, but work became all consuming.

When her brother died of an overdose in 2020, she was back on stage within a month.

"There was so much momentum and I was saying yes to far too many things," she reflects now.

"It got to a point where the idea of touring was giving me panic attacks, and I just couldn't stomach being Ashe, which is such a shame, because I'm her."

In 2023, she had a nervous breakdown and stepped away from showbusiness.

"I had to halt everything. I bought a house in Nashville, I gardened, I saw a therapist and I gave myself a chance to miss music."

For six months, she led a quiet, domestic life. But when pop singer Suki Waterhouse invited her to a session, it rekindled her passion for writing.

She made a tentative return with 2024's deeply confessional album Wilson, then teamed up with Billie Eilish's brother Finneas O'Connell to form The Favors, before signing a new deal with Atlantic Records.

Those experiences mean she's treating the success of Stop The Wedding very differently.

"You can get swept up by all the updates on your phone, but this time I'm navigating the emotions of that, and also going for a four-mile walk and calling my mom.

"There's a real groundedness."

The same can't be said for her new album, Girl of Your Dreams, which is almost deliriously over the top.

Stop The Wedding sets the tone, with abrupt tempo changes that track Ashe's inner turmoil. Lasso The Moon is more whimsical, setting out the star's outlandish requirements for a new partner.

"God forbid I raise my standards," she laughs.

Love Bomb explores the psychology of a manipulative ex (guess who?); while Swan Lake is a comically villainous portrait of Ashe's possessiveness, complete with a Bugsy Malone chorus line.

It's a deliberately maximalist record, recalling the lush orchestrations of ELO and The Carpenters, with a nod to the revivalist pop of Ashe's friend Laufey.

"We were so bored of making music that's boring," she says.

"It scratches an itch for me as an artist to do something different and not meet the status quo."

The album ends back at her second wedding. The closing track focuses on the "real, true, constant love" she's found with musician John Clark Canada.

"You'll be my Tuesday night and my Sunday drive / And the last speech at my funeral," she sings.

Expanding on that idea, Ashe incorporates the ebullient sound of a New Orleans funeral band in the song's closing moments.

And the person they're burying is the disillusioned girl from Stop The Wedding.

Ashe's album, Girl of Your Dreams, is out on 16 October.