“A home for music” in Venice, California is found at a restaurant and bar with a yellow retriever as its logo. Located at the opposite end of the eminent “VENICE” sign in lights, a showcase is held every Thursday night of emerging artists, locals need to make a reservation in advance for, called Winston House. Named after the owner’s childhood dog, there are only two unspoken rules: make new friends and be quiet while the artist is performing. Last minute on a Wednesday night, Winston House arranged a surprise singer-songwriter from Baltimore to play an exclusive acoustic performance on July 20.
“This show actually wasn’t even meant to happen until a few days ago. A friend of mine gave me a call, and we get a lot of calls here at Winston. We put on artists who are in town or new artists, and sometimes we can do it. Oftentimes, we can’t especially because of it being last minute, but I gave this next artist a listen and we just had to put this show on. Ashley Kutcher, give it up,” the host said.
In a long blue dress with small polka dots and well worn Nike Air Force Ones, Ashley Kutcher walked alongside a member of her A&R team who she played with on guitar that night. The artist recently graduated with a Bachelors of Science in nursing from Towson University in Maryland, but over the pandemic Kutcher found she could help others by pursuing music. After receiving attention from major record labels on Tik-Tok through her single “Love You From a Distance,” that has over 53 million streams on Spotify, Kutcher felt it was a once in a lifetime opportunity she didn’t want to take for granted.
Ashley Kutcher’s voice parallels Danielle Bradberry’s, strickenly on “Love You From a Distance”. Though the artist has fifteen songs released on Spotify she is being categorized into the sad hour playlist featuring Tate McRae, Olivia Rodrigo, and Conan Gray when Kelsea Ballerini, Maddie & Tae, and Gabby Barrett may be brought along to boot. Kutcher’s sound can fall someplace in between the debate of country music becoming “too pop” and mainstream pop prevailing an aerated mood to resonate with a coming of age audience. The first song Kutcher opened with was “Strangers,” which is the first track on her EP “One Eighty”. She experimented with different genres on the EP, but she said she found her sound on the single “Love You More” she released back in February.
“I feel like it was definitely a point of discovery. I released so many songs that were so many genres, and I was figuring out what I wanted to do. When I wrote ‘Love You More,’ I knew this was the next song I wanted to put out. It feels like the most me,” Kutcher said.
The lyricism throughout her discography is that if LÈON met Noah Cyrus and Astrid S. Her themes share being stuck on emotions, haunted by heartbreak, and carry the promising message, all will be fine. In “Nothing’s All The Time,” Kutcher writes of experiencing an unpleasant state of emotion, and she reminds herself her storms are temporary, “But good things never last / and neither do the bad things / Easy saying that / but never when it’s happening / Happy or I’m sad / it all feels everlasting / Always when it’s happening,” and in her recent single “Emotionless” she sings of a lost lover who she can’t get out of her thoughts, so she numbs the way she feels to experience emotions less, “I’ll be drunk in an hour or so / Cause that’s how I cope / I think that I’m feeling too much / Every thought leads back to us / Can only hate someone you love / And now that we’re done / I wanna be emotionless”.
The night concluded with her hit, “Love You From a Distance,” surrounded by a crowd of the similar age range. She is an artist who isn’t afraid to wear her heart on her sleeve, or narrate a love song to make her listeners feel exactly what she is singing. To watch her recent music video “Emotionless,” click here:
