ASHLEY ANNE, A COUNTRY SINGER-SONGWRITER FROM VIRGINIA BEACH, RELEASES GENERATIONAL HEARTBREAK, HER THIRD EP.
By Butch Maier
Ashley Anne
Profession: Country singer-songwriter
New EP: Generational Heartbreak (2026)
Previous EPs: Dear Dolly (2024), Call Me When You Land (2024)
Hometown: Virginia Beach
Residence: Nashville
On tour: 7 p.m., Friday, May 22, opening for Zach Top, Patriotic Festival, Scope Arena, Norfolk
Event website: patrioticfestival.com
Official website: ashleyannemusic.com
Country singer-songwriter Ashley Anne—born Ashley Anne Coureas—grew up in Virginia Beach, writing poetry that eventually ended up in her songs. She graduated from Cape Henry Collegiate, moved to Nashville at age 18, and studied for a year at Belmont University before leaving school to focus on music. Ashley Anne, now 22, chatted over Google Meet about her new EP, Generational Heartbreak, as well as her rising career and a certain famous singer she holds dear.
Coastal Virginia Magazine: Let’s start with your first single. Tell me about the origins of Dear Dolly.
Ashley Anne: “I wrote Dear Dolly when I was driving over the Lesner Bridge [in Virginia Beach]. And I was kind of in a season of my life when I didn’t have the most stable homelife situation. And I was kind of going from place to place and staying with friends—kind of just being the rebellious high schooler and trying to figure out what I was doing. And I was driving from a friend’s house, and I don’t remember where I was going that night, but I was just, like, at such a loss. I grew up a Christian, but I think at that point in my life, I was like, ‘There’s no way there’s something up there if I’ve just been dealt these awful cards of my childhood and my homelife.’ I just felt like I had been hit by bus after bus after bus. And I was really struggling with my faith. Dolly Parton is somebody I’ve always looked up to. My grandpa calls me ‘Dolly.’ And she’s just someone—I’ve always loved her music and her storytelling, and it’s gotten me through a lot. I’ve looked to her interviews and her documentaries, and I would watch all of those and literally think to myself, ‘What would Dolly do in my situation?’ I know it sounds silly, but that’s what I would do. I ended up writing Dear Dolly as kind of like, ‘I know you’re a real person, and you’ve experienced a lot in your life, too.’ It was just me looking to somebody else that I didn’t even know, necessarily, just as an ear because I was really struggling at that time in my life. But I was 17 [years old] when I wrote that song, which is crazy.”
CVM: Do you know her now? Have you met her?
Ashley Anne: “No, I have not. Still haven’t had the pleasure.”
CVM: Do you know if she’s heard the song?
Ashley Anne: “I don’t know. I heard her sister had heard it, but I don’t know. I hear she still uses a fax machine for communication—like, totally off the grid.”
CVM: So, you’re going to have to turn your digital version into an 8-track to give it to her so she can play it?
Ashley Anne: “Yeah, sounds about right. Might just have to do that.” (Laughs.)
CVM: She lives just down the street in Brentwood, right?
Ashley Anne: “Yeah, she’s right here. I’ve met some of the people on her team but have not gotten to her yet. I haven’t had the pleasure of meeting her yet. And I say, ‘Yet.’”
CVM: How did your career progress after Dear Dolly? Was it a whirlwind? Or has it been a steady climb? How has your life changed in the past two-plus years?
Ashley Anne: “I would say, when Dear Dolly came out, that was definitely a step in the right direction. It definitely caused a splash in town and told people, ‘Oh, this girl’s here. This is who she is. This is the kind of music she’s writing.’ I think that it would have been a lot slower of a climb if I didn’t have Dear Dolly. But I will say, keeping up with that momentum is also really hard. So, I think I’ve spent the last three years here in town sorting through the business side of things and creating a team that is really about me and that I’m really passionate about. And you can only do but so much, right off the rip—especially as an 18-, 19-year-old. I think I had to be seasoned a little more in the industry before it were to really take off, so that’s kind of where I am at now. I have had a little bit of a steady climb in the last three years, but now I think we’re ready to try and build another moment like that one.”
CVM: What prompted you to call your new EP Generational Heartbreak?
Ashley Anne: “All the songs are kind of about my relationship with relationships as an adult and what I’ve kind of carried over from my childhood experiences—being in a family of divorce and alcoholism and a lot of loss and a lot of mess. It’s about being aware of the fact that I will carry that into my adult life. I started to notice things trickling in about a year and a half into town—once the honeymoon phase died down. In my work relationships, my friendships, and my personal relationships, I started to notice things come up like fear of falling in love because of divorce, and I’ve seen how that can take a turn. So, that’s where a song like Love Looks Like comes from. People always say we aren’t defined by our past, but I believe we are defined by our past. And we’re shaped and morphed by what we’ve experienced in the past. It’s just about how we deal with it and how healthy our relationship is with what we’ve been through. So, I think this project is a nod to a lot of the fans, saying: One, you’re not alone, if you’ve experienced a lot of these things. And two, it’s OK to have these things tied to your past. And it doesn’t make you lesser than. It doesn’t make you less worthy of love and good things. It doesn’t mean you’re doomed.”
CVM: You wrote poetry when you were young and turned the poems into song lyrics. What is your process for writing songs now?
Ashley Anne: “Writing poems into song as a child created a relationship to songwriting that was very vulnerable and very honest. And when I had experienced that for nine years in my life, and then you move to Nashville, and co-writing is such a thing—getting in rooms with other writers and writing a song with two or three other people. And there’s just a lot more to it when there’s other people in the room. So, I think, with trial and error, and figuring out who my close writers were—who I knew I got good songs with—I mean, that takes time. So, I think that, now that I’ve been here almost four years, I definitely have that clan of people. But I will say, I have carried my old relationship with songwriting as a kid, and just writing, like, to cope or writing to wrap my head around something I’m confused by. Or, you know, to make myself feel better in a crappy situation. I think I’ve carried that into my songwriting now, and I write alone a lot, still, which is actually very rare here in Nashville. But I think that exercising that muscle is super important for me, because I need to continue to remind myself to get back to that core reason of why I write songs—and that’s for the emotional side of things, and to make people feel better about situations, and make people feel not alone.”
CVM: What portion of your music is autobiographical? Or is it everything?
Ashley Anne: “I mean, it pretty much is everything. The only song I can think of is She Ain’t Texas, and that was one of my first-ever releases. And I just…”
CVM: Is that a cover?
Ashley Anne: “No. It was a song that I wrote by myself. I had just moved to Nashville, and I was like, oh, everybody is co-writing. That’s the thing. So, I was like, I need to learn to write songs for others in order to get a publishing deal. So, I sat down and wrote She Ain’t Texas for a female country artist. I wrote it, I posted it, it went viral on TikTok. I was kind of forced to release it because everybody wanted it. But other than that song, everything has been my story and my experience, and I like it that way. I think it makes it more fun for me.”
CVM: I guess in my mind, I heard “ain’t Texas” and thought…is there a song that goes, “This ain’t Texas?”
Ashley Anne: “Yeah. That is Beyoncé. (Singing.) “This ain’t Texas…” (Laughs.)
CVM: I knew I heard it somewhere. All right, so, your Instagram page (@ashleyannemusic) says, “I am what the tide dragged in.”
Ashley Anne: (Laughs.)
CVM: Why? How so?
Ashley Anne: “I think this is, like, me kind of making light of my chaotic self. I don’t know. I think that my look and my personality is very bubbly and, you know, go-with-the-flow, and easygoing, and I like to say I’m fun to be around. I like to have fun. I like to dance. I like to just be the entertainer in the room. And I think in my brain, if somebody could crawl into my brain, they’d be like, ‘Oh, there’s actually a lot going on in there.’ I’m not like as I always come across as, unless you really do dive into the music. You know, it’s pretty deep. I always say, ‘I am what the tide dragged in,’ because I just showed up in my chaotic form and have been through a lot at a young age, and that has allowed for a lot of wisdom and just being able to wrap my head around things and perspective. So, I think that pours into the music.”
CVM: Do you have any dream collaborators for the future? I mean, I think I can guess one.
Ashley Anne: “Would you say Dolly Parton? ”
CVM: Yeah.
Ashley Anne: “I mean, that would be insane, for sure. I think there are so many.”
CVM: Name one.
Ashley Anne: “I always say Hardy is a huge one, which people probably don’t expect because he’s rock. (Laughs.) Doesn’t seem like the vibe, but I just have admired him so much as a songwriter.”
CVM: Are you working on a full-length album?
Ashley Anne: “I do have a full-length album in the works. I am just kind of waiting for the right time to start rolling it out and trying to build all the momentum I can now with these EPs and these singles in hopes that once the fanbase is built, I can hit them with the big project.”
Butch Maier
