Moral of the Story: Chapter 1

Raised in San Jose, California, in a conservative Christian family, Ashlyn Rae Willson was exposed to secular music by her grandfather. “He was the savior of the day,” Ashe tells Apple Music. “He’d drive me around on road trips and put on the Eagles and Elton John—the good stuff. So he saved me. ’Cause otherwise it was Christian rock radio–which has its lane, but not in my life.” She began learning piano at the age of eight and writing songs not long after, using them as a form of therapy and escape from a tumultuous home life. After graduating from Berklee College of Music, she moved to Nashville to pursue songwriting, and in 2017 co-wrote Demi Lovato’s hit “You Don’t Do It for Me Anymore” before releasing her own debut EP, *The Rabbit Hole*, a year later. Its follow-up EP, *Moral of the Story: Chapter 1*, as she explains in this track-by-track guide, is once again built on catharsis. **Figured Out** “Simply put: I feel like I have nothing figured out in my entire life. That song is mostly a song about comparison. It’s that ugly bug that gets to all of us. The grass is always greener. That feeling of like, ‘Man, all my friends, they really have their shit together, but I don’t.’ That’s that song.” **Bachelorette** “‘Bachelorette’ is the most vaguely written song of the entire record, which is for a reason. So I won’t go into too much detail, to keep it vague. But that one’s basically just feeling like I was caught between a rock and a hard place and feeling forced to be the bad guy. No matter what I did, I was going to be the bad guy.” **Shitty Places, Pretty Faces** “Basically a song about feeling stuck in life. Stuck and trapped. And ultimately, as hard as it may be to leave or get out of a really hard situation, there is the option if you’re brave enough to take it. I blew up my life when I filed for divorce. I owned a house with this guy that is now long gone, and money, long gone. I blew it up. But at the end of the day, I was like, \'I’m not trapped in this toxic thing. I do have a choice. I can get out.\'” **Moral of the Story** “I had filed for divorce but the divorce wasn’t finalized when we wrote the song, so I was still connected to this unhealthy thing that was not good for me. I think writing it I was telling myself what I needed to hear: ‘It’s all right, in the end you’re gonna be better for this, everything’s gonna work out.’ But when I was writing the song, there wasn’t a big feeling of that yet. I wasn’t actually feeling like everything was going to work out. But sometimes you just have to be there for yourself. The song’s kind of like, ‘There there, it’s gonna be okay, you’re gonna be all right.’”