Toronto, Canada, based R&B and Pop artist Ashley Lyn makes waves in her music through the use of her themes of female empowerment and her perfectly pop-centric vocals that pull us right into the music. After spending time learning many covers, Ashley Lyn decided to take her own songwriting and enter a studio for the first time to create her awe-inspiring debut single “I Want it 2”. To deliver a visual aspect to Ashley Lyn’s craft, she also delivers a music video for her release “I Want it 2” and it puts Ashley Lyn at the center of attention. Putting forth a romantic aesthetic to the video, Ashley Lyn filmed her latest music video at a European-styled castle where she was able to explore incredibly eye-catchy camera movements that seamlessly transition from one scene to the next.
Ashley Lyn is planning to continue honing in her craft of being a musician and filmmaker in her future projects and we cannot be more excited to see what will be coming next.
You can find "I Want it 2" here.
Hello Ashley, and welcome to BuzzMusic. Congratulations on your latest song and music video "I Want it 2", it’s quite the steam show. Can you tell us what you had envisioned for bringing this song to life and if you feel you achieved that? Thank you so much! I really appreciate BuzzMusic for providing a platform for independent artists to showcase their work. I’d done a lot of home recording in the past with my covers over the years, but recording ‘I Want It 2’ was my first time ever in an actual recording studio! The end result and the whole process of hearing all the elements come together within the span of a few short hours completely surpassed my expectations. The track is more sultry than probably anything I’ve ever done vocally, and the production work was really next level. I feel like I achieved what I set out to since we were able to successfully incorporate some of my favorite musical influences while leaving enough room creatively to allow me to put my original flair on things with the lyrics and vocals. What makes me feel especially accomplished about this project is that beforehand I was sort of struggling with aspects of artist identity and what my defining sound should be. It’s a great feeling to now have a foundation to build upon that still allows for lots of versatility. We loved the atmosphere you created on your music video "I want it 2." It gave a sense of royalty and enchantment. Can you tell us a bit about the site you chose for this video? The location for the ‘I Want It 2’ music video felt like it came right out of a storybook. We did do a bit of staging and some set design, but it did not take a lot of role-playing to truly feel like royalty and get into character. We shot at this stunning European-style castle built on acres of property in the most unassuming of places. The architecture and charm really allowed us to explore a lot of depth with the camera work and utilize the space to style a variety of scenes for a dramatic cinematic touch, which ultimately added to the grand scale of things. I’ve always admired the lavishness of big-budget pop music videos, so it’s amazing that we were able to pull this off aesthetically for my first release as an independent artist, especially in an era where the majority of artists take the simplistic approach and are no longer putting loads of money into music video budgets and visuals. With the release of your first music video "I Want It 2", what did you enjoy most about the experience?
Filming on location was definitely my favorite part of the process because in those moments I got to witness a culmination of all my ideas coming together finally in one cohesive vision after months and months of planning. The 1st day of the shoot was absolutely wild! There were sets being built from the ground up, cameras flying around on cranes, a full production crew, and lots of good food. I guess it also didn’t hurt that I was surrounded by a bunch of hunky chiseled male models aha! My family also came out to support, and I don’t think they even understood the scale of what I had actually been working on until they saw the production in full force that day on set. I don’t know how I did it but I was able to keep my cool and shake off the nerves and everything went super smoothly. It was such an amazing and larger than life experience for me as my first personal project filming on set and everyone was super hyped. We had such a blast. What has the music community in Toronto Canada infused into your music? Have you been able to find creativity and collaboration within the music community there? I actually draw a lot of my inspiration from American pop music and culture. Since a very young age, Hollywood is where I’ve looked to first and foremost, but there is so much opportunity now on the Canadian music scene with popular local artists like Drake, The Weeknd, Shawn Mendes, Alessia Cara, Tory Lanez and Jessie Reyez coming out of the woodwork and bridging the gap into the mainstream. Everybody loves a good success story and I really stand behind how these artists have helped put Canada on the map. I’m very proud to be a part of the Toronto music scene, where I think there is enough diversity and demand in the market for me to be able to create my own lane, do things on my terms and see where that takes me. I’m just at the start of my music career and I’m happy to have found that creative match with the producers I collaborated with on this project (shoutout to Boris & Trey) who really understood my artistic vision and were able to pinpoint exactly what I wanted with the work we did on ‘I Want It 2.’ Now that I have a stylistic reference, I’m optimistic that this will open up a lot more opportunities for me for creative collaboration within the local community in the near future.
What can fans anticipate next from you, Ashley?
I had so much fun launching my first release. I learned a lot about myself as a musician and it also allowed me to combine both my creative passions for music and filmmaking. I definitely plan to delve deeper into directing going forward and hope to continue to provide compelling visuals along with my music that work well together to tell a story for my fans to look forward to. I really like to challenge myself creatively and there’s so much uncharted territory I wish to explore musically as a new artist, so stay tuned!