Ashley Aucoin
-by Autumn Cox
Maybe we are all just fools who get lucky. We take chances, meet people who change the direction of our lives, lose people and carry pieces of them forward. For Ashley AuCoin and Colin Ingraham, that idea became more than the title of their first album. It also came to describe the way the record itself took form.
“We’re all fools that got lucky,” Ingraham said. “We’re here. We get to be here and create this.”
When the project began in October 2019, AuCoin and Ingraham had no plans to become songwriters.
“At first, it was only going to be like a cover song album,” AuCoin said. “Because we hadn’t really started writing ourselves.”
They recorded three songs with J.P. Cormier before COVID interrupted the process. Life got busy, their children grew, and the album was put on hold. When they returned to the studio in 2025, their vision was still taking shape.
The turning point came with Fools Get Lucky, an original song by Ingraham’s great-uncle, the late John “Johnny” Gillis.
As a child, seeing his great-uncle play guitar at a family gathering marked a turning point for his musical career. Music was always playing at home, but seeing someone from his own family perform, and put their songs out into the world made it feel possible. With no one in his immediate family playing, Ingraham taught himself.
Years later, Gillis’s album Dowser would help push Ingraham and AuCoin toward writing themselves. Cormier also held Gillis in unusually high regard, once placing him alongside Bob Dylan and John Prine among the best songwriters he knew.
“The biggest inspiration was Johnny’s album,” AuCoin said. “That was the kicker for the whole process, really.”
What stayed with them was the way Gillis could take a place, a person, or an ordinary moment and make someone else see it too. Gillis was able to hear their version of Fools Get Lucky, along with about half of the album, before he passed away.
The couple was nervous if they had done his song justice, but to Johnny it was a true gift at the end of his life. “My God, it’s amazing,” they remembered him saying. “It’s so awesome. Don’t have any regrets.”
“Johnny’s song is what kind of opened it all for us,” AuCoin said. On the drive home from the studio, she remembers thinking, “This is what I want to do. I want to write. I want to be a musician.”
AuCoin had already spent years singing and performing, and she and Ingraham, partners in life and music, met through the music scene 18 years ago. Writing their own material together was new, and the album has grown with them over the years.
Their first original, Where The River Meets The Sea, was also the first song AuCoin had ever written. She and Ingraham wrote it together, drawing from a time when they were living away with a new baby and she badly wanted to return to Chéticamp.
Their other originals, The Way It Goes, Whispers On The Wind, and If You Could See Me Now, carry similar reflective threads of family, home, love, and loss.
Rooted in folk, country, bluegrass, and traditional music, Fools Get Lucky starts bright and open before slowly turning inward. It’s like looking back on a summer you did not know you would miss, where the sweet and the bitter sit side by side. The songs move through growing older, losing people, coming home and learning to hold the people you love a little closer.
AuCoin leads on all 10 tracks, with a resonant voice that is full of warmth and heart. Cormier leads the instrumentation and Ingraham joins her on backing vocals. The further the record goes, the closer the stories seem to move toward home.
“We’re trying to write things that people can relate to,” Ingraham said. “And that’s Johnny’s way of writing too.”
The Way It Goes, written about a week after Gillis died, opens the album with the idea of taking chances and rolling the dice. It ties naturally into Fools Get Lucky and the way the record came together over seven years without either of them knowing exactly where it would lead.
The covers were chosen with the same care.
“When we were choosing cover songs, I didn’t want to choose just random cover songs either or random artists,” AuCoin said. “I wanted to choose artists that had either affected us personally or musically.”
Cormier is one of those people. A longtime friend of AuCoin’s, he recorded, mixed, and mastered the album and plays the instrumentation throughout. The album is released under Ashley AuCoin’s name, with AuCoin singing lead on all 10 tracks and Ingraham joining her on backing vocals.
When AuCoin first brought Cormier Where The River Meets The Sea, she was more nervous than she was getting on stage.
“I was shaking so bad because I was just thinking, ‘What if he doesn’t like the song?’” she said.
Cormier listened and told them they were recording it that day.
The album brought other firsts too. It is AuCoin’s first release featuring her own songwriting, Ingraham’s first time singing on recorded tracks, and If You Could See Me Now was recorded live off the floor.
Their children have grown up around the process, learning instruments, singing harmonies, and beginning to perform themselves. One of their daughters is eight, only a year older than the album.
What began with three cover songs now holds four songs written by AuCoin and Ingraham together. The people who influenced them are still there, but for the first time, their own stories are there too.
Fools Get Lucky will be released on streaming platforms August 21st. Physical copies are available at www.ashleyaucoinmusic.com.