Ashley Cleveland
Nashville, Tennessee10 reviews across 5 releases
Ashley Cleveland is a singer-songwriter from Knoxville, Tennessee, who began working as a Nashville session vocalist in the mid-1980s before recording her own material. Her debut, Big Town, brought a rough-edged R&B influence to contemporary Christian music, with lyrics that treated marriage, parenthood, faith, and personal struggle as parts of the same life. Bus Named Desire shifted toward pop while retaining some blues attitude, and its songs remained more concerned with human experience than with formal religious language. On Lesson of Love, Cleveland moderated her full-force delivery in favor of soulfulness and added hymns to her repertoire without losing her rock background. Her voice could move from a restrained ballad to a full-band performance, while her songwriting made domestic subjects, including her son Henry's childhood, part of her spiritual vocabulary.
After Men and Angels Say appeared in 2005, Cleveland continued recording beyond the period covered here, releasing Before the Daylight's Shot in 2007 and God Don't Never Change in 2009. She also published the memoir Little Black Sheep in 2013, followed by One More Song in 2018, a record addressing recovery, family, aging, and faith. Cleveland's association with guitarist and producer Kenny Greenberg remained central to her recorded work, as it had been since the early 1990s. By 2021 she had joined the staff of Church of the Redeemer in Nashville as a pastoral associate, while continuing occasional musical work. She later trained in spiritual direction and works in that field in Middle Tennessee.
5 releases reviewed
Bus Named Desire
Lesson of Love
Second Skin
Men and Angels Say