From Legal Professional to Music Artist
Lancaster graduate Ashley Davies (Law and Italian Studies,1993,Lonsdale) has recently pivoted from a legal career to form the band 'Ash and the Love Handles'. The band's debut album Maybe I’m Dreaming was released earlier this year on major streaming platforms.
Ashley graduated with a degree in Law and Italian Studies and then spent many years working as a solicitor. But in the back of his mind he always wanted to try his luck at music.
Ashley feels that studying at Lancaster equipped him with the broad skills necessary to succeed both as a legal professional and as an independent music artist.
“It is a bit of a cliche, but I think it is true that a degree does involve learning how to learn and put into practice what you have learned. I think by the end of my time at Lancaster I had a set of transferable skills that have helped me to turn to a new career outside law including being organised, proactive, setting goals and sticking to deadlines. You need those sorts of skills whether you are a lawyer in a big firm or working for yourself as a music entrepreneur!”
Ashley recalls that the welcoming atmosphere of Lancaster was particularly helpful for students who wanted to pursue artistic endeavours alongside their chosen degree programme. Ashley regularly sang with the University Choir and also used the Music Department piano rooms that were available for students to book. This helped him to take a break from legal studies and do something that he also found both exciting and fulfilling.
“Lancaster University was such a fun and open place to study that I found people were keen to try new things a little out of their comfort zone. For some of my friends that meant writing a song and getting up to perform."
He notes that at Lancaster he wrote songs with many fellow students and many of those students remain friends to this day.
“My time at Lancaster inspired a number of songs and a couple of them have even found their way on to my first album. One of those songs is called Money Lies, which started off life as a guitar riff and temporary lyrics which I wrote while a resident of Lonsdale College. The music stayed in my mind over the years. When it finally came to putting an album together I added some new lyrics and found it fell into place quite easily.”
That album is called Maybe I’m Dreaming and was released on Spotify, Apple Music and a number of other streaming platforms earlier this year. Ashley felt it was a suitable name for the album given that he sometimes finds it a bit hard to believe that he was able to go from being full time in the office to being full time in a home recording studio to realise his musical dream. He thinks the positive entrepreneurial culture fostered at Lancaster was crucial to achieving this.
“Making a record is sort of a dream come true for me. I appreciate that as an independent artist it will be hard to find an audience for it though!”
Putting together a professional sounding rock album in a home studio also had its challenges. Not being particularly savvy when it comes to computers and tech, Ashley found he had to quickly get up to speed on music software, modern recording techniques and the digital world generally. He also had to quickly get to grips with social media and how to promote music as an independent artist - setting up a YouTube channel as well as opening accounts on Instagram, TikTok etc. However, Ashley feels the skills he learned at Lancaster helped to serve him well when it came to tackling this new territory.
If you want to listen to the album Maybe I’m Dreaming by Ash and the Love Handles on streaming platforms you can find the relevant links here:
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