‘MY WHOLE TWENTIES WERE MY DAD’ S ALZHEIMER’S’

After the death of country music icon Glen Campbell in 2017, his daughter Ashley found solace in her father’s love of jazz. She sought guitar lessons from Thor Jensen and romance blossomed, followed by their new album

‘We are very much a Venn diagram,” Ashley Campbell says. “We are our own circle.” Thor Jensen adds: “But we also have a large overlapping piece.” Raised in Phoenix, Arizona, singer Campbell is sipping a cup of oak-milk coffee in Bear Market in Stillorgan, south Dublin, with her dog Frodo by her feet. Jensen, her boyfriend and her partner in acoustic Americana musical duo Campbell/Jensen, is sitting next to her.

She has a look of her father, the late American country music icon Glen Campbell, and is in a reflective mood. “I have been very fortunate to have a very happy life for the most part,” she says, “But definitely there was a very low point for me.

“I was taking care of my father – and I was happy to do it, of course — right before we made the decision as a family to put him in a care community to take the responsibility off us. There was a time when we were having to take turns sleeping in the room next to his.” She remembers there was a baby monitor. “If he got up in the middle of the night, because of the Alzheimer’s drugs he was taking, he was groggy, he could fall down. I would try to guide him to the bathroom so he wouldn’t pee on the floor or the wall.

“I had been on it a couple of nights and you’d hear the bell, and you’d jump out of bed and run in there. I caught him but he almost fell on me, and he could have really hurt both of us. None of us had had any sleep.

“I remember getting him back to bed and going out to the hallway and my mom finding me, crying on the floor — just hunched over, crying, on the floor. I was 26, 27.” How did she feel?

“My whole twenties had been Alzheimer’s. And I was just feeling trapped and sad. Grief, and everything was all crushing down on me at the same time. So, that is a low point that I remember. But I didn’t ever hold it against my dad. Never. It was just a moment. I’m glad my family was there for him.”

He died on August 8, 2017, aged 81, after a six-year struggle with Alzheimer’s disease.

Jensen has also had low moments in his life. “Thor’s been through the ringer,” she says.

“I was in California for a while, as someone trying to play music,” he says. “My mom got sick back in Connecticut, and I had to move back.”

He sold his car and bought a van. “The van was clearly stolen but I didn’t know. I just bought it off some guy for a thousand bucks so it could fit all my stuff. I fitted a bed in there.”

He made it to Tennessee before the gaslight went off in his car and he was out of money. “I had to ask favours off people, all the way across the country.”

He says it reminds him of a story his father, also called Thor, told him. He was driving from New

York to Iowa when the transmission of the car fell out. “He was on some highway, and he was like, ‘Alright, OK.’ He took the licence plate off and left the car and just walked. It was what you did back then. You didn’t get in trouble for leaving a car.”

“There was a certain freedom to doing that,” Campbell says. She inherited a sense of freedom from her mother, Kimberly Woolen, who four years ago published a memoir, Gentle on My Mind: In Sickness and in Health with Glen Campbell.

“She is a wonderful woman,” says Campbell. “When she met my dad, she was a dancer in New York city. She was dancing at Radio City Music Hall. She danced with Rockettes. She played a little guitar and sang a little bit too. When she met my dad she joined along for the ride and became a mom.

“She devoted her life to raising me and my two brothers — and taking care of my dad, because when they met he still had a big problem with alcohol and cocaine. So, she really brought him around and saved his life. And now she’s living in Nashville. She got remarried last year. My mom is great. We are very close.”

Earlier this morning, Campbell and Jensen and Frodo came over on the ferry from England — where they set up home in Richmond last August — to support Sandy Kelly on tour around Ireland and promote their debut album, Turtle Cottage, which they recorded in the studio of that name in January 2023 on Mahee Island in Northern Ireland.

“My dear, dear friend Elisa [Bonora], who I call my godmother, lives in Belfast. She is Italian. She made a documentary about my father.” She is referring to Glen Campbell: I’ll Be Me, the 2014 American documentary film, edited by Bonora, about Glen that won a Grammy Award and was nominated for the Academy

Award for Best Original Song for writing the film’s theme I’m Not Gonna Miss You. “As a result of »

I have spent a lot of time in Northern Ireland. Also, my grandmother — on my dad’s side — her family came over from Ireland

» Elisa being here, I have spent a lot of time in Northern Ireland. Also, my grandmother — on my dad’s side — her family came over from Ireland,” she says. “Her name before she married into Campbell was Stone. Carrie Stone.”

Campbell and Jensen met in Nashville three years ago. She was looking for someone to teach her gypsy-jazz guitar style.

“I grew up listening to the gypsy jazz of Django Reinhardt. He was my dad’s hero. He thought he was the greatest guitar player in the world.”

Jensen was recommended by a friend to teach her to play like her father’s hero. “I still have his first voice message. He was very professional.”

She does an impersonation: “Hello Ashley. I got your message. I’d love to give you a guitar lesson. Just let me know where and when.” He came to her house. They fell in love. How did it go from there? “Jensen said to you,” I jest: “‘We need to get a dog and move to England?’”

“The dog’s been around longer than I have!” he laughs.

“I already had the dog,” she confirms, adding: “We connected instantly over laughter.”

“I always have a list of jokes you can’t see inside my jacket pocket,” he says.

I ask Campbell what makes her laugh. “Farts. I’ve got to be honest. Farts are funny.”

“We connected laughing together to It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia,” he says of the American sitcom with Danny DeVito and Mary Elizabeth Ellis.

When Covid-19 hit Nashville in 2021, they quarantined together. He was already playing in Campbell’s band. In lockdown in the same house in a new relationship, they wrote their first song.

“The first song we wrote is the first song, P&P, on our album. That song is about new beginnings, and the uncertainty that comes with new beginnings but also trusting it and taking comfort in it.”

There is a song called A Song By Vampires For Vampires which started as a title before it was a song. “It’s a love song about a vampire couple in love going through time and the ups and downs of being a vampire.”

Such as?

“Weeping a bit that you never get to see the golden sun but at least we have each other,” says Campbell. “It is really about the eternal quality that love makes you feel.”

There is also a vaguely haunting instrumental song, Edge Of The World, which they wrote while staying at a hotel in Wales that was near the edge of a cliff.

“You felt you were on the edge of the world,” she says. “Especially at night when there is no moon and you can’t see the stars. You are looking over the edge of the cliff and you can’t even see the ocean and it looks like you are looking into the void.”

She released a solo debut album, The Lonely One, in 2018 and in 2020 a second album, Something Lovely.

She grew up in Arizona, which she describes as “pretty normal. That’s why my mom and dad raised their family away from the entertainment industry.”

He was brought up in New York City, his father working at Tiffany’s for 20 years in quality assurance. “Before anything went out to the floor, he would see it last.”

Was he as fastidious in his home life? “Not in the slightest. My dad was a hippy who was reluctant to put on a tie to go to work every day.” His mother was a chef who

The first song we wrote is the first song, ‘P&P’, on our album. That song is about new beginnings, and the uncertainty that comes with new beginnings but also trusting it

owned a restaurant in New York. When he was 10, his parents split and they moved to south eastern Connecticut where his mother Deborah opened a restaurant. “I grew up in a restaurant kitchen,” he says.

Is he a good cook?

“I can get around.”

“Thor knows a lot about food,” Campbell interjects. “We love to cook together.”

They are away on tour a lot — Europe for the entire summer. When they are back in Richmond, home life is, says Campbell, “beautiful and quiet. We go on walks. We go to the pub.”

“We love Sunday roast,” says Jensen, before Campbell adds — with the comic panache of a character from It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia — “Coming from America we’re like, ‘We get Thanksgiving every weekend?

This is amazing!’”

Apropos of English — or indeed any — pubs, she says she wasn’t put off drinking alcohol because of her dad’s well-documented problems.

“I have never noticed any kind of bad patterns with my own drinking habit, I don’t think I have an addictive personality. I am very good at self-regulating. I am not worried about it.” l