ASHLEIGH DALLAS
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EVEN WHEN SHE IS HAPPY, she is sad, or preparing to be sad, or accepting that sad is just happy plus time plus reality. Sad-adjacent you could say.
That doesn’t necessarily mean in her words or her stories, for Ashleigh Dallas is no perennially glum fortune teller, no natural miserabilist: this is checked shirts and working jeans Australian country music, not northern England army overcoat rock after all, and no one expects the rain will just keep going. (More likely, they wish it would start, toot sweet, or we’ll all be rooned etc.)
And across her career so far the preponderance of narratives would definitely fit into the decent people living decent lives and mostly enjoying themselves category. Take for example If There Wasn’t Any Money, on this new album, which opens on a brisk fiddle and drums rhythm that practically demands someone say “toe-tapping”, and Dallas singing “I’ve always had a song in my heart and music in my bones/Felt the love every day, flowing through our family home”.
There are concessions to less than perfect situations, but still …: “And on the days when I felt down, letting mistakes rule my day/It’s the love that surrounds me what really changed the way.”
Regrets? There may be a few in Shining Somewhere, where steel guitar raises an eyebrow at least amidst the clip-clop rhythm. But then again too few to mention, or at least dwell on. “Mistakes? Well, we’ve all made ‘em, sometimes we let them get us down, too long/Regret? Well, we all face it, it’s something we have to get over …”
Elsewhere, Secondhand Stories says things are going to get easier, maybe better, or at least they’ll be your own tales to share; Worth Remembering takes us from insecure new parents to the verge of empty nesters and says experience at all, and “write it down, ‘cause it all goes by in leaps and bounds”; and the title track, which closes the album in a gently swaying, mandolin and banjo reflective mood, puts us among one of those children now looking at their parents’ and grandparents’ twilight years, recognising the days going by just as quickly, but leans into valuing now instead of regretting later.
Even Over To Me, a very pretty, slow wander through layered voices and intersecting guitars of varying tones, that addresses a small catalogue of personal faults that won’t be fixed by anyone else, suggests potential for change rather than succumbing to regrets-in-anticipation.
So, what the hell was I talking about with that sad-adjacent business? Well, there is something about Dallas’ voice, without obvious effort and certainly without the affectations of mournful instrumentation or mood-imposing arrangements, which carries that tone and makes you look past the surface and the subtext to something deeper still. Something in you, beyond the song.
Rather than weighing the song down, her voice quietly opens up the possibilities of interpretation, so that absences tug a little harder, pleasures come slightly questioned, futures feel a bit more uncertain. Something is at play underneath, niggling at this benign surface.
It’s not overt. It couldn’t be: Australian country doesn’t like things to get “too” anything, certainly not too heavy, so there is a place, where this might be seen as a negative for Ashleigh Dallas, this shadow that passes over even the brightest of her songs.
But for me, it deepens and broadens this work.
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