“I’m working on music and then it’s fall so just kind of getting the kids back to school,” Ashlee Simpson Ross tells HollywoodLife EXCLUSIVELY at the H&M x Yellow Feather Fund to celebrate the H&M x Sesame Street Partnership in West Hollywood, CA. While she and husband Evan Ross, 31, formed the musical duo Ashlee + Evan to release their debut EP in 2018, it’s been eleven years since Ashlee’s last solo album, Bittersweet World. Since then, she’s gotten divorced from Pete Wentz, married Evan, and welcomed a daughter, Jagger Snow. Now, she tells HollywoodLife that she’s spending her time “working on [music], having fun doing it and enjoying my kids.”
Is there any chance that this new music might feature a duet with her older sister, Jessica Simpson? “Definitely,” Ashlee tells HollywoodLife. “I feel like Jess and I — because we’re sisters, our tones sound so good together. We have like some Christmas duets, but we need to do a real song.” When asked what an Ashlee + Jessica song would sound like, the “Pieces of Me” singer thought about it for a second. “I don’t know. I think her and I — she’s got her groove back, so I feel like… She has a great studio at her house so I think that if we wrote together, it would be very cool.”
Working with Ashlee might be the best thing for Jessica since her younger sister has experience writing with family. Her Ashlee + Evan project has given her an insight on resolving “creative differences” with her loved ones. When asked if she ever clashed with her hubby, Ashlee tells us, “We do.” However, it’s never anything that they can’t work through. “Right now we’re doing solo projects, but we definitely ask each other for advice, you know? But it was actually so much fun when we were making music together and touring together. That was like a dream.”
“Being together [for Ashlee + Evan] was so fun because it was easy to have the family out, but [being a solo artist] was great too,” she adds. “And it’s fun to have that, for the rest of your life, that we made music together. We will still do it.”
In addition to 2018’s Ashlee + Evan ep, the duo released “Phases” in March. Described as a “meditative new love ballad” by Rolling Stone, the song features “lovelorn verses before some impressive harmonies.” The couple called it “one of our favorite songs. It’s about the journey that life can take us on and how we all go through these different changes.”