By Kira L. Schlechter

The sheer act of putting out music in these days of streaming and listeners’ short attention spans demands as much creativity as making the music itself. 

Singer Ashleigh Semkiw and her guitarist/harsh vocalist husband Colin Parrish of the Texas symphonic/progressive metal band TULIP are taking a crack at putting out three EPs of four songs each – released several months apart from each other – that will encompass a full cycle when put together.

The first, out now, is “The Dark Tetrad,” comprised of “Arabella” (with Kristyn Hope), “Devourer” (with Kristin Starkey”), “Calliope” (with Dropout Kings), and “Ophelia” (with Shaolin G of Basement Ghost). 

“These first four, we wanted all to be collabs.” Ashleigh said in a phone interview prior to the band heading to Europe later this fall for gigs opening for Ad Infinitum and Seven Spires (keep an eye out for my partner’s videos from the Hamburg show in October!) 

Ashleigh talked about each song’s featured artists and touched a little on the subject matter of each:

“(Guest vocalist) Kristyn Hope is a very close friend of ours,” she said. “We played our first show in Texas ever as a band in 2018 with (her; Kristyn was in the band Aesop at the time). That’s actually where we found our guitarist Cody as well – she and her husband, Clay, who’s also in Daedric (Kristyn’s current band) were all friends.” 

The two then became fast friends, Ashleigh said,

“We spend a lot of time together; our kids are friends,” she said. “They don’t live too far away, (so) we work with them a lot, not necessarily just musically. We help them with their music videos – our videographer, Michael Levine, does all their stuff – we kind of have this fun artist collective up here in North Texas now.

“They’re just all the best people, real hardworking, and I’m so excited that she’s blowing up now because she’s so talented. When we were thinking about a feature for ‘Arabella,’ she was just the first person that came to mind. She’s got this really interesting scream and it’s very consistent and also very scary. And she’s gorgeous and looks great on camera and is a great actress, so it was a perfect fit for that,” she said. 

We plan to follow up with Ashleigh later on about lyrics and what’s behind each song, but she did touch briefly on the subject matter of “The Dark Tetrad.”

“We wanted it to be four different archetypes of women and that’s why (the songs) are all named (for) different women,” she said. “I had this book of symbols that I love and looked up the meaning of each of the women’s names.”

“I think (Arabella) means ‘graceful’ and ‘beautiful,’’ she continued. “The story of the video is Kristyn, her loss of innocence. She’s beautiful, pure, sweet, playing with the doll, and then she starts to go to the dark side. That one was personal for me too –  different women in my life that turned out that way. Nobody starts out evil, right? So that’s where that came from.”

Ashleigh and booming contralto Kristin Starkey have been close friends ever since TULIP toured with Kristin’s band Temperance in Europe last year.

“We were living on a bus together for a month,” she said. “She has an opera background, same as me, and she’s just the most phenomenal vocalist. 

“(The classical world is) such a cutthroat piece of the musical world. It’s very competitive, especially with women. So I was a little nervous to meet her because I thought, ‘OK, if this is going to be another opera diva, I don’t know what I’m going to do for a month,’” she said.

But as she said, she and the native New Yorker (who lives in Sweden with her husband), “became besties right away.”

“She’s so down to earth and really fun and smart and funny – we just bonded over our past classical music trauma and our love of being onstage. She would just blow me away every night,” she said. 

“Devourer” came about on one of Kristin’s visits to the States.

“She stayed with us for a week; we recorded the song, wrote it together,” she said. 

The title is based “on this concept that Colin really loves called ‘the devouring mother,’ sort of the dark side of the maternal archetype,” Ashleigh explained. The concept itself comes from Jungian psychology.

“We grew up in Canada, so we know a lot about (psychologist and author) Jordan Peterson – he’s into this idea of these overbearing mothers, just being controlled by guilt or fear,” she said. 

The actual lyrics, though, written by her and Kristin, are not exactly in line with the title.

“The song is mostly about (how) she had been in an abusive relationship; I’ve been in abusive relationships, and escaping,” she said. “It’s (like) please love me, what more can I do, and it’s never enough, it’s never enough. It could be about a parent but we wrote it from the perspective of a romantic (thing).” 

This collab, together with their fast-growing friendship, also led Kristin to tap Ashleigh and fellow powerhouse singer Marina La Torraca for yet another collab, on a cover of the “K-POP Demon Hunters” song, “Golden” (which, if you haven’t heard, is completely irresistible – their video has over 118,000 YouTube views).

“We have a TikTok, but I don’t have the app,” Ashleigh admitted. “Colin has all of that; I’m an Instagram girlie. I didn’t know anything about TikTok, but I do have kids, so I knew about this ‘K-POP Demon Hunters’ show because my daughters are obsessed with it. I already knew the song because they’ve been singing all of the songs all summer.

“So Kristin’s like, there’s no metal cover of it yet, could Colin make an arrangement of it? And he loves doing that, so he banged that out in a day and sent it to the girls. They sent him their parts back, and then Kristin put together that little video that we made.”

This may not be the only time these three join vocal forces.

“I think we’re going to do another one of the ‘Demon Hunters’ songs,” Ashleigh said. “(And) there might be a future for the three of us to do something (else). We get along great and our voices are all different, so we can all contribute different things to a song,” she said.

Unlike the first two tracks from “The Dark Tetrad,” the last two have a decided hip-hop bent, courtesy of their guest artists. 

“We toured with (Dropout Kings) when we went out with Ill Nino,” she said. “We didn’t quite fit; we made it work. But we got along with them so well and they’re really great people.

“And then when they were coming through to tour, they came to stay with us at our house for a few days and we shot the video with them. And then we lost Adam, which was horrible,” she said.

Dropout Kings singer Adam Ramey died in May.

“He had just had a baby and we knew his wife,” she said. “You never know what somebody is going through. He was the happiest go-lucky, fun guy.

“We miss him. It was a shock. 

“But it was good that we got to spend some time with him before he was gone, and we’re still going to keep in touch with those guys. We love that song and it’s hard to watch the video now because he’s in it so much. But it’s still a nice memory to have,” she added.

Calliope, of course, is the muse of music in Greek mythology.

Ashleigh plans to end TULIP’s upcoming European shows with this track.

“I’m most excited to perform that one live because I just think it’s so interesting,” she said. “Colin reached out to him because he also has a really interesting scream … and he’s also a great lyricist. We asked him to do it and he wanted to do it, (so) that was great.” 

Ophelia, of course, is the doomed significant other of Hamlet in Shakespeare’s tragedy. But it also touches lyrically on Ashleigh’s own past. 

“For sure, a hundred percent,” she agreed.

In a nutshell, she and Colin escaped a strict Calvinist Baptist church in Canada after the two (who were both married young to other people) fell in love. They both left behind families who are still in the church, including Ashleigh’s mother, with whom Ashleigh still has a very strained relationship.

“That ebbs and flows,” she said. “I can have empathy for her knowing that her life wasn’t perfect. All of us are a product of the things that happened to us in our life, and of course, there’s always a choice. 

“It has changed. We made some strides there so maybe we’ll figure it out, we’ll see. I don’t know. It’s hard when people are set in their ways,” she added. 

Ashleigh is unsure whether “The Dark Tetrad” will be released in a physical format.

“We’re working with our management on that; we’re trying to figure out the best way to release it,” she said, “We wanted to get the four (songs) out and get this algorithm running and give some music to our fans before we go on tour. 

“And also, we didn’t want to tour on old material. We’re still going to be doing some of our stuff that people are asking for, like our bigger songs, but the set will have these new four in it,” she said.  

The second EP will be titled “The Depths,” based on a graphic novel written by one of her 12-year-old twin sons. The music is finished; Ashleigh is currently working on lyrics and vocals and she anticipates a fall release for it.

“I want to take so much care with these next four (songs) because we both love them so much – they’re very special,” she said. “So I want to make sure that I have the time. … And also our management is like we need to keep this momentum going.

“We have a really great artist named Will and he’s going to be doing almost like a film with it. It will be a cartoon, but it’s going to be beautiful. (The music is) very progressive. It’s much truer to the traditional TULIP sound,” she said.

The graphic novel is about a boy being separated from his mother, Ashleigh said.

“This little boy named Axel (is) walking through a forest and he falls into The Depths, he calls it – it’s like a pit,” she said. “He encounters all these different bad guys, different characters, who are trying to get him. His mom saves the boy and then they get out of the pit together.

“The first song for sure will be a lot more storytelling than allegory, but sort of similar to what we’ve already done,” she added. 

The final EP will be titled “The Light Triad” and that will also have a few collabs on it, she said. It should be out in the New Year. 

TULIP’s inclusion on the Ad Infinitum tour came after Marina’s band, Phantom Elite, who was originally slated to open, suddenly disbanded. Ashleigh says it was partially because of Marina that TULIP filled the vacancy.

“She’s someone that I never even met in person, (so) that was really very generous of her,” she said.

“I’m going to be doing a little bit of a collaboration with Melissa (Bonny of Ad Infinitum) on a song; I just recorded that for them. We’re leaving on October 20 and we’ll be there for a few weeks. I think it’s going to be awesome. This community is so warm and welcoming and lovely and everybody wants to bring each other up and I really like that,” she said. 

TULIP is considering “doing something in the UK, maybe in January or February,” but that’s not definitive.

“Our management’s German, (so) they’re always trying to get us to come there,” she said. “We also have an American booking agent and he puts us up for stuff and sometimes we get it and sometimes we don’t. 

“The U.S. side is trickier for our style – and people don’t really want to go out anymore after Covid. It’s hard to get people to go to a show,” she said.