Music can move people, and in the case of Jeremy Ash it has moved him across Canada.
While Calgary serves as Ash’s home today, his first time living in Calgary was in 1998, to join a band called BABE with his long time friend, Sean Rice.
Rice found an ad for the band in a magazine looking for a drummer and a bass player, and called up Ash to see if he would be willing to move from Toronto for the opportunity.
“I was looking for any reason to get out of there,” said Ash in a face-to-face interview.
With the founding members, Jessica Erlendson and Dolly Sillito, the band found reasonable success, staging a few shows and managing to release an album that Rice still owns on cassette.
Though the band has agreed to keep their working relationships strictly professional, Rice and Sillito started having a more serious relationship.
“Two quarters later came together to make 50 cents, shall we say,” said Ash in an email interview.
The band was disbanded on good terms in 1999, as the sexual working relationship between the two members created too many complications on the business end.
“As soon as you introduce sex into a working relationship, there is no longer a working relationship,” said Ash in an email interview.
Ash was born in Corner Brook, Newfoundland, in December of 1973, but with both his mother and father as Salvation Army officers, his family frequently had to between towns as his parents were reassigned to different churches across Newfoundland.
Ash played in the brass band for the Salvation Army from an early age, which contributed to his musical interest.
With every new town he lived in, his instruments came with him and helped him make new friends that shared an interest in music, which is how he met Rice for the first time when Ash was only 15-years-old.
By 18-years-old, Ash moved out from home and joined six others in a road trip from Newfoundland to reach Toronto.
Beyond that point, Ash would find himself in many cities across Canada, from Halifax to Vancouver.
Through all this time and travel, much of Ash’s original collection of instruments remains with him.
In 2010, he began writing children’s songs, stories, and sing alongs. However, this project had to be put on hiatus.
“Life got in the way and I had to pay the rent,” he said in an email interview. “It never really got of the ground, but it has always been there. Maybe one day…”
Now a proud father, his 2-year-old son, Cohen Ash, is surrounded with a toy box of musical instruments. The young toddler is already taking interest to play music with his dad.