OLAF GROWALD
Ansley
Ansley and her keyboard
It was an alcohol-infused conversation, to be sure, at the end of December’s annual Dallas Observer Music Awards. Ansley Dougherty, the Fort Worth singer and songwriter whose style has traveled a ranging path of curiosity from folk to rock, indie and “piano-driven songwriter pop,” had been nominated for best female vocalist. That came off a strong year in which she made her solo debut in an album called Rituals under the Hand Drawn Records label and quit a side job as a music school teacher to pursue music.
“Eric and I had had a few at this point,” Dougherty (SEE VIDEO INTERVIEW BELOW) says, referring to the guitarist Eric Webb, one of her bandmates. “He sits me down and says, ‘You need to go to Nashville if you want a national platform, if you want to be a musician and have your name known by the world.’”
This spring, Dougherty, 27, released “Time Wasted,” writing it on guitar and pushing her comfort zone again. “It’s got this almost Americana feel to it.” Dougherty was invited to play in the Fort Worth house in March at South by Southwest in Austin and performed several shows around the city during the festival. And in July, she’s moving to Nashville, a decision she hasn’t shared widely.
“Making a living playing my music, that’s my A dream,” she says. “But the nice thing about Nashville is, there’s a million B dreams.” Webb, the guitarist, feels she can make her mark in Nashville as a songwriter, she says. Backup touring, teaching and working in studios are also opportunities. And coming back to Fort Worth to help aspiring artists is a possibility, she says.
If Nashville’s known for country, that’s fine. “There still is plenty of country going on in Nashville,” she says. “But I don’t hate country as much as I used to. A good song is a good song.” Bringing “a good song to fruition, that’s what I bring to Nashville.”
And this is a good time in her life for such a move. She’s written a lot of what she calls “sad, kind of breakup songs,” inspired by her own personal life. “Terrible dating experiences, mostly,” she says. But now she’s in a good relationship with boyfriend and musician Chase Jewell, who’d also been thinking of moving to Nashville. “We just decided to take the shot,” she says.
Being in a good relationship is changing the songs she writes. “I can’t write songs about heartbreak anymore, because that’s not what I’m going through anymore,” she says. “The new challenge is writing about stuff that has nothing to do with romance.”
Dougherty grew up around music. Her dad still plays in bands, and her grandmother was a USO singer. Dougherty started singing in her church and school choirs and had a folk band as a teenager with the bass player Sam Villavert that played regularly in Grapevine. She spent one semester at St. Edward’s University in Austin, but lacking a network and a car, she decided to come home to the Fort Worth area and look for work in music. Working at Buon Giorno, she met a drummer who helped her get a job at the School of Rock, her first job in music.
“That led to me needing to learn piano” to pair with her voice, she says. Dougherty also met the bass player Zach Tucker at Buon Giorno, and the two launched the Panic Volcanic rock band, successfully releasing an album in 2014-15 and establishing Dougherty as “Ansley the Destroyer.” In the process, Dougherty, who’d gone on to graduate with an economics degree from the University of North Texas, accidentally head-banged herself into injuries to both retinas.
Panic Volcanic soon faded, and Dougherty, in a bad relationship, took time off from songwriting. Then she mounted a comeback, completing a batch of songs and recording them at producer Taylor Tatsch’s studio and musicians’ retreat in Dripping Springs. The band Ansley was born, with drummer Matt Mabe, bass player Kris Luther, Webb on guitar, and Tatsch. She finished Rituals in July, an album of songs, mostly mellow and written on piano. Dougherty, who has regular gigs around the city, is still a one-woman band in running her business, acting as her own agent and scheduler.
“I’m a semi-natural born leader, and that’s why I’m a good band leader,” she says. “But I still feel like a kid singing in my hairbrush these days.”
