Listen UP!
Ash Bowers is one of country music’s newest faces. He’s been out on the road building up a fan base with an opening slot on Jason Aldean’s “Wide Open Tour” this past spring.
Here’s his story…
Before Bowers got his record deal he worked to build a his career grassroots style. After singing in church throughout his childhood, he started to sing solo at open mic nights until, at 20, he put together his first band. Just a year later, he was offered a Pacific tour through Armed Forces Entertainment after they had listened to a three-song demo he and his band had cut in Jackson, TN.
“They told us, ‘If you can be ready to leave in three weeks, you can go,'” Bowers says. “We all had good jobs and we were playing bar gigs, but I knew I was going with or without them. They all said, ‘Yeah’ and we went.”
The band played military bases in Japan, Korea, Guam and the Marshall Islands for 42 days, and when they returned they were a tight performing unit.
“It was probably the best learning experience we could have had as a band,” he says. “We learned what it was like being on the road, playing four or five nights a week. At that point, it was either go back and get another day job or book some gigs, and we weren’t about to go get jobs.”
They began with shows throughout western Tennessee, and as word spread they were able to work steadily from Alabama to California. “In 2004 we played about 180 dates,” he says. “In 2005 we played 200 plus.”
Then came a pivotal moment in Ash’s career. A Nashville publisher saw the band on one of those dates and approached him afterward. When he learned Ash aspired to a record deal, he encouraged him to come to Nashville. Soon Ash was restricting his playing to weekends and spending his weeks commuting daily to Nashville. The kind of commitment it took to drive 260 miles a day, five days a week–it quickly paid off.
“I was getting a lot more accomplished in Nashville than I was trying to build a grassroots career on the road,” he says. Just a year and a half after he began commuting to Nashville, a CD of his material reached Broken Bow/Stoney Creek Records president Benny Brown, who invited him to play at a corporate Christmas party in California.
“The party was on a Saturday,” he says. “That next Monday we had a deal in progress.” Signed both as an artist and as a songwriter, he was soon working with some of Music City's top writers.
“I’ve had people ask, ‘Did you ever think you’d get to this point?’ I say, ‘Absolutely!’ I never once doubted myself or my determination. I knew eventually there’d be an opportunity for me to get out of the jobs I was working and run with it, and that’s exactly what I did. Every day I get up and try to figure out another song to write or another gig to go play.”
Check out a live performance of his second single, “Ain’t No Stopping Her Now.”
