What Is It Like to See Ashe Live?

"Moral of the Story" Closes It, and You Will Scream It

Her breakout is the last song of the night on every run on record, with no encore walk-off before it. When it starts, the show is ending. At Brooklyn Steel on June 3, 2025, Local Wolves wrote that it "had the entire audience screaming at the top of their lungs." At Oregon State's Memorial Union in November 2024 the crowd sang and shouted it "in an almost therapeutic fashion." It's her most-played song on setlist.fm, logged 91 times, and it closed her opening sets in arenas in 2026 too. By the 2025 Fordham show she'd rebuilt it as a pop-rock song rather than the quiet ballad from the record, so don't expect the studio version.

Barefoot, Hair Flying, Never Planted

She doesn't stand behind a mic stand. At the sold-out second Chicago night of the 2022 tour she walked out barefoot onto a raised platform under a curved arch and, in the words of Melodic Magazine's review, "never stopped moving." At Fordham's Winterfest on January 31, 2025 she was barefoot again in a shiny blue velvet jumpsuit, flicked a pair of skinny black sunglasses offstage, and spent the set whipping her hair around. She warned that crowd it would be "a very silly show." At Oregon State she danced off at the end to Shania Twain's "Man! I Feel Like A Woman!" blasting over the PA. If you're up front, you'll be watching her cross the stage, not stand still.

Every Era Has Its Cover Song

The cover slot tells you which year you're in. In 2022 it was Queen's "Somebody To Love," every night, 43 times by setlist.fm's count; in her own tour diary she called that solo one of her favorite parts of the set, and the Nashville crowd reacted from the first line. In 2024 and 2025 she rotated Gracie Abrams' "I Love You, I'm Sorry" on piano, Chappell Roan's "Good Luck Babe" and Taylor Swift's "Love Story," which the Fordham crowd acted out verse by verse. In 2026 it was "Total Eclipse of the Heart" in the arena sets and "Unwritten" at the Calgary Stampede. Back on her first headline tour she did Oasis' "Champagne Supernova" with her opener.

She Tells You Exactly What the Songs Are About

The talking is personal and specific, not "how are you doing tonight." At World Café Live in Philadelphia in 2019 she explained that "Wrong Side of Myself" was about her brother and a family affected by addiction. At Fordham she said a friend had pointed out she had no angry songs about her divorce, which is how "Hope You're Not Happy" happened, and joked that her love songs are "always morbid" before "Pull the Plug." At Brooklyn Steel in 2025 she dedicated "Love Is Letting Go" to her late brother: "Life is short y'all, hold your people tight." She'll also tell you how close she came to quitting. "I took a long time off and I wasn't really sure I was going to come back," she said halfway through the Oregon State set.

The Voice Holds, and When It Doesn't, the Room Covers

Reviewers keep landing on control. Park Life DC, at the sold-out 9:30 Club in April 2022, said she "knows how to wonderfully control it while performing live," and a Fordham student writer thought the live versions beat the recordings. She doesn't fake it when she's tired. At Marathon Music Works in Nashville late in the 2022 tour, her voice was worn down and she asked the crowd to help with the high note in "Always," stopped to catch her tears, then nailed the last note anyway. At Brooklyn Steel in 2025 she walked away from the mic for a bridge and let the crowd take it.

Group Therapy That Ends in a Scream-Along

Ashe told the Globe in 2022 that the show is "more than therapy," with everyone singing, crying and laughing together, and the fans who write about it say the same. A solo concertgoer at Brooklyn Steel in 2025 wrote on her Substack, Scribbled Milk, that she sobbed through "Love Is Letting Go" until a security guard "wordlessly leaned over and handed me a tissue," then walked to the subway feeling part of "a pilgrimage of like-minded souls." The crowd skews wide: Atwood Magazine guessed the 2019 Philadelphia room ran from 13 to 60 years old. And at Oregon State, a student named Amber Dunlea said, "She walked by me and I was at a loss of words." She closed that Fordham night with a question: "Well, did I win you over?"