ASHA shines bright with ‘Silver’ debut
Atlanta newcomer gives hope for young women in R&B
Somewhere between R&B singer/songwriter Jhene Aiko’s “He gotta eat the booty like groceries” lyric in “Omarion” and K Michelle’s “My Life” reality T.V. drama, the urban landscape isn’t as inviting to young female singers as it once was. While male singers thrive in the hip-hop and sex-laden music that passes for today’s R&B, the space once occupied by artists such as Monica, Ciara, and even Cherish is vacant. With her nine-song debut Silver, Atlanta newcomer ASHA is a beacon of hope that the city’s young female R&B legacy may still have life in it.
ASHA keeps her full name and age off the record. As a child in Paterson, New Jersey, her mother insisted she play a musical instrument to balance her scholastic and athletic gifts. She played violin and switched to viola in high school when she grew to hate the sound of her first instrument. As for singing, she did her best to keep it in the shower, feeling like she had yet to put in the practice needed to call herself a singer. Until 2013, she was a college soccer player who accepted a Georgia State University athletic scholarship to pursue a biology degree that she planned on parlaying into a career in anesthesiology.
“I don’t know what happened,” ASHA says. “I ended up in a studio and someone said, ‘Your voice is so dope. You should work on it.’ So I took a year to work on how I wanted to sound.”
Silver shows off her impressive vocal range. The ease with which she manipulates her voice in the opening song “Creep,” offers no less than three different intonations. “When I record, I don’t like to stay in one scale,” she says. “I’m not in a major or a minor key; I stay in a chromatic key, so it keeps me able to do anything I want.”
Ballads such as “Rider” and “Realize,” on the other hand, are reminiscent of Aaliyah, Brandy and Jazmine Sullivan, who married their voices with traditional R&B elements to create a fresh sound that speaks to their generation. ASHA is the person for whom the music is created — young enough to be wide-eyed and hopeful, and mature enough to plan out the future she wants.
Supported by a management team of industry vets, spearheaded by Radio One executive Jason Reddick, ASHA is in control of her creative process. But when asked to elaborate, she remains the shy girl, sharing the story of how Silver came to be with the same effervescence that many of her peers might speak of a newfound love.
Silver is the culmination of ASHA’s artistic maturity, and the highs and lows of young adulthood and love. The project came together over a two-year period that saw ASHA change her major (from biology to Arabic, French and Spanish), transition from college athlete to professional artist, and experience her first major breakup. To share the complexity of her life, she is creating a comic strip to illustrate the parts of her story that can’t be conveyed in three and a half minutes. “Every song on the project has a place in my heart and a real, behind-the-scenes meaning, even though it may not be communicated through the song,” she says. “The songs are like pieces of a puzzle.”
Silver stands at once as a symptom and an antidote to the state of R&B, whose newcomers are increasingly hard to distinguish from rappers who depend on Auto-Tune to carry their voice. Both the title and the music represent the gray area she sees being ignored in the creative and societal conversations happening around her. For her, the album finds balance between heartfelt love songs and tales of lust. “In the middle,” she says, “there is a silver lining.”
ASHA plays A3C’s R&B Untapped showcase on Fri., Oct. 7. 6 p.m. The Music Room, 327 Edgewood Ave S.E.