The Jimmies' Ashley Albert: A BlogHer-Style Renaissance Woman

• Share This Post
• 1
• submit
• 2
• Sparkle (
  0
  )
   

We have an absolute ban on crappy kids' music in our house -- there is no twee, there is no saccharine, there is no pander-y, there is no limply unimaginative (*cough* Wiggles *cough*). Finding the good stuff isn't always easy, especially when great resources like The Lovely Mrs. Davis bow out, and when your kids' tastes wander from The Candy Band to Laurie Berkner -- but you don't want to be trapped in a musical style rut when each album goes on its mandated indefinite repeat rotation (*cough* autism *cough*).

That's where Ashley Albert and her band The Jimmies can help. Their album Make Your Own Someday is a treat without being sticky-sweet, and skips through musical styles with skill -- my kids and I agree that The Jimmies are plain good listening. Plus, bonus -- Ashley is a real person, Twitter told me so. After she and I bopped tweets back and forth, and since my kids constantly demand Jimmies songs origin stories and information about when new songs are coming please, I asked Ashley if she'd be game for an interview during the BlogHer10 conference. She said yes! And then I became, as I suspect you will become, dumbfounded by all the areas in which Ashley is succeeding. Prepare to be ... amazed!

The Interview with Ashley Albert of The Jimmies

Tell us about where the Jimmies came from.

The Jimmies are a total accident. I'm the voice of Nickelodeon, and a friend there was looking for kids band for a show. So I threw one together in a week  for the audition. With only three songs and no experience, We clearly weren't  ready for that season, but they liked it enough that told me to go out and pull it  together for the next season. Then the show got canceled ... but it was too  late, I had a band.

I wasn't planning on getting into music or the entertainment industry even though my dad is a record producer in Miami, and I grew up literally sleeping on the couch in his recording studio. I won a songwriting contest in third grade, for a country song influenced by my parents' divorce -- and my dad made fun of it, because he said "everyone" hates country music -- to my third grade mind, that meant that everyone hated my music, so I stopped writing songs entirely. My dad was also so afraid I'd get into the music business that he never encouraged me to play an instrument or sing.

And then, ironically -- when I was 19, I found my way behind a microphone through the backdoor and started doing voice-overs professionally (Besides Nick Jr. I do all sorts of commercials and cartoons and hold buttons ... for things like McDonald's, HGTV, MTV, Dunkin' Donuts, Coke, The Disney Fairies ... all kinds of stuff ... I'm even the little girl in all of the General Mills Cereal  Commercials ...  I get to hang out with the Trix Rabbit and Lucky the Leprechaun a lot.)

When my dad found out about the band and heard our songs, he said, "Why didn't you tell me you could write songs?" I ended up producing the album with him. It's been amazing. If nothing else, being able to work with my dad on the Jimmies albums has totally changed my life. My dad said that I was, by far, the most difficult artist he ever worked with, and his artists included Crosby Stills & Nash, Allman Brothers, Aretha Franklin, the Doobie Brothers, and Eric Clapton.

When Is Your Next Album Coming Out?

We just finished our next album “Every Day's a Holiday.” Not sure when it'll be  out though. Think I need to find a good PR person first. It's on my to-do list.

Do you write your own songs? You have so many different styles, do they emerge organically?

I do write my own songs. They just sort of emerge, and I write them down quickly, usually within an hour or two. It's not a planned process. I'll get a nugget of an idea, and keep singing it until the rest of the idea comes. Sometimes I'll be walking down the street and will come up with hook, and I'll have to keep singing it until until I can get to a place where I can record it. I used to sing into my phone, but my new phone doesn't have a recorder, which means sometimes I don't know what to do!