%20ILLUSTRATION%20Isadora-Ayesa%20Lima%20SOURCE%20Amazon.jpg "The Best Prime Day Apple Deals (2026) Are About to Expire")
Consider the arithmetic. More than 100,000 submissions went to the Josie Music Awards this year, each one a song or a performance that somebody believed in enough to send. When the nominations were announced, “Ashes Next Door” by Ray Ray Star was one of thirteen left standing in its category, Song of the Year – Rock Artist. Numbers like those do not describe luck. They describe a climb.
It began a long way from any spotlight. Ray Ray grew up in North Delta, British Columbia, and did his first playing in basements. At fourteen he joined his first band, Lethal Virus, as a guitarist. He has written about hearing Social Distortion as a young teenager and being hooked on the spot, and it is not hard to see what a kid would take from a band like that. Punk’s first lesson is that nobody is coming to hand you a career. You build it yourself or you do not have one.
That lesson is the whole story of independent music. A major label artist has a building full of people working on a release: promotion, radio, publicity, distribution. An independent has a phone, a laptop and whatever energy is left after the gig. Every listener is earned one at a time. Every review, every playlist, every booking is the result of somebody doing the asking, and usually that somebody is the artist.
Ray Ray learned every part of the job because he had to. He toured internationally, playing his own music and working as a guitarist for other artists across more than one genre. He became a record producer and an executive producer, working with other bands and labels. Nothing on that list was handed down from above. Each skill was picked up on the way, the way a climber picks up gear, because the next stretch could not be done without it.
The climb was not a straight line. By his own account there was a time when he doubted he would ever create again. He has since called that the biggest lie he ever told himself, and the work he has done lately is the proof. The singles have come steadily through Nova Anthem Records: “Feelin’,” “One Step Away,” “Suitcase and a Dream,” “Ashes Next Door” and “Slow Motion Fall,” featuring Matt Pascale. That is not the output of a man who is waiting to be discovered. It is the output of a man who has stopped waiting.
The Josie Music Awards exist for artists exactly like him. They are the largest independent music awards show in the world, and they hold their ceremony at the Grand Ole Opry House in Nashville, on one of the most revered stages in American music. On September 20, Ray Ray walked into that building as an official nominee. For someone who started in a suburban basement with a guitar and an idea, there may be no better measure of distance covered.
What makes the nomination meaningful is what it was for. It was not a popularity prize or a reward for the size of a marketing budget. It was a songwriting honor, given to a song on its merits by people who had a hundred thousand others to choose from. In the independent world, that is the only currency that counts. The work has to be good enough to rise without anyone lifting it.
Every independent artist knows the odds, and most keep going anyway, because the music will not leave them alone. Ray Ray Star kept going. One in 100,000 is a long shot by any reckoning. It is also, as he has shown, a number that someone has to be.
The official website for Ray Ray Star may be found at https://www.rayraystar.com
