Ashley Brooke Toussant, who celebrates the release of her new album, Sing About Everything, with a concert from 2-4 p.m. on Saturday, Oct. 3, at Visible Voice Books, grew up in Canton surrounded by family members who sang. As a result, it was only natural that she would become a singer-songwriter herself.
“Both my parents have really nice singing voices, and I enjoyed singing with my sisters and had a lot of family who loved being an audience to us,” she says via Zoom from her Cleveland Heights home, adding that Susie Underwood will be putting on the Kate Bush puppet show as an opener for the Visible Voice release party. “We always had music playing. I sang in the church folk choir when I was in middle school, and when I was in college, I would come back and sing with them.”
After she graduated from Kent State, she wanted to pursue music more seriously in a bigger city. She and her now-husband and moved to Chicago to manifest her dream.
She worked at Starbucks during the day and would hit the open mic circuit at night. About three months in, she met Jim Tullio, a Grammy-winning producer who had worked with acts such as Mavis Staples and Hall and Oates. She released an EP that he produced in 2008.
When her husband decided to return to Kent State University for more schooling, she followed. She did a few short tours, traveling the East Coast in a Ford Focus. She also did a honeymooon tour out in the Pacific Northwest, and released an EP in 2014. After releasing that EP, she embarked upon a “first family vacation” tour in Virginia.
Around 2019, her oldest child was in kindergarten, and she was trying to find time to play music again.
“I felt a lot of pressure to write and wasn’t doing it,” she says.
At the same time, her son’s teacher and she were emailing, and the teacher asked her to come and sing in the class.
“But in the moment, I thought, ‘What if I ask her to have the kids come up with words?’” says Toussant. “That’s how it started and how I wrote a few of the songs. For the first song, they picked a theme, and it was ‘springtime.’ They picked words like butterflies and birds and warmth.”
That activity yielded the tune “Needed Glory,” and her son wrote the poem that opens the tune.
She took the songs to a studio in Midtown to record at her friend’s clubhouse, and she recruited local musician Andy Curlowe to record and play on the album with her. They recorded them over the course of a year, and Toussant simultaneously helped Curlowe with his album. It’s due out in November.
“He encouraged me to just try stuff out,” she says of Curlowe. “I play guitar, and I can read music and play piano, but I’ve never felt like I should play a piano part. He encouraged me to try it. There is my experimenting on the album, and I’m proud of it. I’m playing flute and clarinet as well as some piano parts on ‘Are you Awake?’ It was so much fun.”
A band will back her for the upcoming release show, making the gig, like the album, equally suited to adults and children.
“I want the album to be a collection of songs for everyone. I have always connected with kids all my life and babysat. Kids are my people. That’s part of what makes it so fun too. I want to encourage kids to see that you could do this too. I’ve started to teach songwriting for my kids’ school district and that opened up more opportunities. I have played at the Wandering Lantern Children’s bookstore, Afterschool shop and Checkered Shelf bookstore. I have played in a lot of bars in the past 20 years, and playing for families is so much more fun.”
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