Ashley Parker Angel

• Genre: Teen Beat
• Hometown: Redding
• Ashley Parker Angel Website

About

Ashley Ward Parker was born on August 1, 1981, the same day that MTV was launched. He got his heavenly last name much later, taking the name of his stepfather, Ronald Angel, when his piano teacher mother remarried. But that's not all he got. Ashley, who had been playing keyboards since the age of four, was introduced to the rock aesthetic by Mr. Angel, who showed him his way around guitar and drums. Those skills came in handy when the then-teen auditioned along with 1,800 other applicants in 2000 for the ABC-TV reality show, Making the Band, presaging so many other reality shows that were still germs of ideas in Simon Cowell's large brain. While the show was a modest hit for the network, it eventually unleashed second wave boy band O-Town into primetime and "All or Nothing" into the charts. But O-Town had an advantage that other purveyors of teen pop didn't: an automatic audience even before they released Liquid Dreams, their first album on J Records. Their second album, O2, was less of a success, primarily because the novelty had worn off and there wasn't a TV show to annotate the frothy pop confections. The band eventually broke up with Angel falling on rather hard times, flat broke and bunking on his pregnant girlfriend's parent's couch. But oh what fodder it was for another reality show. In 2005, MTV chronicled his roller coaster life as a pop figure with There And Back, chronicling the always hard knocks comeback trail--even for someone as toothsome and talented as APA. The result of his front-of-the-camera efforts is the aptly titled Soundtrack to Your Life released in mid-2006.

- Jaan Uhelszki