We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Golden Blue a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.

Golden Blue, thanks for joining us, excited to have you contributing your stories and insights. What’s been the most meaningful project you’ve worked on?

Our upcoming debut album is the project that means the most to us so far in our careers. We have known each other for 15 years and met playing music in a high school band. We’ve spent the last decade helping others with their music projects, dreaming of the time we’d be able to take the reins and find our own identity in music.

Co-producing our first full-length album is incredibly meaningful to us — it’s something we were daunted by for many years and we’re proud and excited to be fully diving in. This album is also a tribute to Ashley’s dad, who was a tremendous music mentor to both of us. We have loved being able to explore our own sound and find out what kind of music we really enjoy making.

Great, appreciate you sharing that with us. Before we ask you to share more of your insights, can you take a moment to introduce yourself and how you got to where you are today to our readers

Golden Blue is a band made up of Johnny and Ashley Perez. We’ve both been touring as multi-instrumentalists in various bands, producing projects for other musicians, and writing for other artists for the last decade. In 2020, we moved back to Ashley’s hometown of Nashville to start pursuing our own music dreams.

We are a fully in-house production team with the desire to create authentic art, sonic landscapes, and emotionally impactful music experiences. Ashley focuses on writing lyrics and melodies, chord progressions, and synth programming. Johnny loves to program drums and unique percussion, as well as mix and master anything he can get his hands on. We like to use sounds from the past using vintage gear to connect listeners with a sense of nostalgia. If we do what we intend to, you should be able to listen to our songs in your car and be taken back to a memory you forgot to remember for a long time – an important moment of understanding with a family member, a sense of a big and unknown future that hits you like a ton of bricks, or a bittersweet realization that there’s a lot about life you can’t control. More than anything, we appreciate the way music when shared, helps us all feel seen and known, even from afar. We’re proud of the work we’ve done for others, but we are most proud to be releasing our own music that feels true to us.

For you, what’s the most rewarding aspect of being a creative?

For us, creating art is a way to process life and the world around us. It gives us an outlet that is deeply rewarding and a lifeline in difficult times. Art has the power to impact someone’s life through one simple moment, and those moments may never come around again. You never know when that time will come, and what the impact will be. Sometimes creativity feels like trying to catch lightning in a bottle, but in reality it’s a lifetime of work and dedication, and we’re just lucky when those moments shine through.

Music in particular has a way of connecting individuals despite their differences, and anything we can do to bring people together makes us feel like we’ve offered something beautiful to the world.

What’s a lesson you had to unlearn and what’s the backstory?

We had to unlearn the idea of perfectionism in art. The belief that music has to be perfect and polished to be impactful or even ready to be released. This is something that held us back in our own endeavors for some time. We both grew up on stages and in environments where this idea was perpetuated and we had to be overly polished. In the end, we discovered that music that is polished to perfection often loses its soul that connects with people. We want to release songs that are incredible in quality but still deeply human and authentic in that way.

Contact Info:

• Instagram: @goldenblueband

Image Credits
Matthew Daniel