Crash course on Ashley Parker Angel

[Rodney]

Some of you may know that my step-grandson is Ashley Parker Angel, whose struggle to forge a solo music career was followed on the show There & Back, which was the #1 show on MTV this year. (Previously, he had been a member of the boy band O-Town.)

Well, his album, Soundtrack to Your Life, is out now, and it debuted at #5 on the Billboard Hot 200. Call me prejudiced, but STYL is a great album. (I think of it as APA STYLe.) The tunes, all of which he wrote or co-wrote, have great hooks and wonderful variety. If you look at the reviews on Amazon (http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/customer-...&n=5174&s=music), of which there are currently 88, you will notice that most of them mention the fact that all the songs are good. Only a handful of the writers give the album fewer than the full 5-out-of-5-stars rating--one fellow sneeringly gave STYL one star and a dismissive, unintellectual comment, and the others gave him four stars out of five and good reviews.

There are several moving ballads, and one of the slower cuts sounds just like a forgotten Beatles record--a good one at that!

I believe many of the members here would love this album, especially those who like some of the harder rock (which is clustered in the first half of it, and which normally I do not care for myself). One standout is "Crazy Beautiful."

People usually don't like to be asked to listen to music, so I won't do that. What I request here is that you watch this video:

http://www.ashleyconnection.com/media/APA_...indowsMedia.wmv

You will get a crash course in all things Ashley Parker Angel. Apart from his career, Ashley is a very beautiful person. I love him, and I think you will be glad to have been made aware of him.

Try to pay attention also to the music in the background--it is from the album. Listen for "Crazy Beautiful," which I hope is his next single ("Let U Go" was his first)--though my favorite is a quietly haunting cut called "Shades of Blue," not heard here.

[Rodney]

The latest Amazon review of Ashley's album Soundtrack to Your Life is very interesting:

The Lost Beatle?, January 13, 2007

Reviewer: Ambassador Marcum (Toldeo, Ohio)--See all my reviews

If My Chemical Romance [an American rock band] had a place in his iPod then he must have had Sgt. Pepper's playing in his crib as a baby and he never forgot it. It's pretty hard to mistake the Beatlesque quality in many of the songs here and Angel certainly pulls off the similarities in fine enough quality and originality to say that he would have done Paul and John proud as their understudy. But the early 70's late 60's sound doesn't stop there with borrowings from Pink Floyd, Tommy James and a good hint of 10cc. A wonderful reinvention of a sound long past in a new generation. APA makes a great argument for many of us from an older generation to pay attention to the pop charts occasionally.

Edited January 16, 2007 by ashleyparkerangel