The art of writing honest love songs, according to Chicago musician Naomi Ashley

Love in the time of COVID-19 could be the theme of Love Bug, a new album of original songs by Naomi Ashley, who has emerged as one of the busiest Chicago songwriters in recent years. Written primarily since the pandemic took root, Ashley’s songs span the many varieties of love — flirtatious love, deep love, love gone wrong and obsessive love. Fitting, then, that she has chosen Valentine’s Day to release Love Bug at a show at FitzGerald’s, and that her own love story unfolds throughout her album and on the stage. Naomi Ashley shows off her new release, Love Bug. She will premiere the album at FitzGerald’s on Valentines Day. Taylor Glascock for WBEZ Fresh to Chicago in 1996 from Olivet Nazarene University in downstate Bourbonnais, Ashley discovered a songwriting community at FitzGerald’s, particularly Rhythm & Rhyme Review, a long-running open mic hosted by poet-songwriter Scott Momenthy. It was there she first realized that songwriting could be a vocation. “I was beguiled walking into FitzGerald’s. It was a high quality introduction to songwriting. That really made me really start to write,” said Ashley, who up to that point had spent most of her life in Moville, a small town in western Iowa where her family grew soybeans and corn. City life was new. At first, she pursued a career as an actor in Chicago; the experience led her through some familiar paths for any hungry actor: She performed in improv, in children’s shows and comedy cabarets and with groups such as Noble Fool Theatre and the Neo-Futurists. She also wrote shows and helped create The Bowling Show, a partly improvised show that ran a full year at Timber Lanes Bowling Alley in North Center. The do-it-yourself nature of the Chicago storefront theater scene was inspiring — “You could just decide to write a play and put it on in a bowling alley and run it for a year. It was crazy,” she says now — but […]

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