Aynsley Saxe Straight Into Disaster
Some relationships are impossible to resist, even when the warning signs are impossible to ignore. On “Straight Into Disaster,” Georgetown, Ontario singer-songwriter Aynsley Saxe captures the intoxicating rush of falling in love when heartbreak feels inevitable. That tension between desire and impending loss drives Saxe’s latest single, the eighth release from her forthcoming sophomore album, ‘A Thousand Stars,’ arriving in 2027.
Check it out on Bandcamp here: https://aynsleysaxe.bandcamp.com/track/straight-into-disaster
Her voice is carried by just an acoustic guitar and a bass. The song captures the dizzy rush of falling hard for someone while knowing the relationship has an expiry date. Saxe wrote it after her marriage ended, as she found her way back into a dating world that had changed completely since she last stepped into it.
“I wrote ‘Straight Into Disaster’ when I was entering the dating world again after my marriage ended,” she says. “Being back in the dating scene was very foreign to me and everything had changed dramatically since I had last dated in my twenties. Eventually I was willing to meet new people, but I definitely wasn’t ready to get hurt again. At first, I think I unconsciously chose to meet people who weren’t necessarily compatible with me in the long run so I could get my feet wet again without getting hurt. Well, as the saying goes, ‘humans make plans and the universe laughs’. That strategy backfired entirely and ‘Straight Into Disaster’ was written.”
Listen on Spotify here: https://open.spotify.com/album/5ltDUK3oA25kNEJfTvkx7b?si=H7vuhPWvQ2uHLLtbYV3fsg&nd=1&dlsi=dbeb0003597f4b96
What came out of that experience is a song about holding on with both hands while the clock ticks down.
“When you know your relationship is ultimately going to end it creates a lot of emotion and a push-pull feeling,” Saxe explains. “You don’t know if you should hang on and enjoy your time with the person for longer or let go because you know you’re not right together in the long run. ‘Straight Into Disaster’ is about that feeling of love juxtaposed onto fear. It’s about the moments when you’re trying to delay the inevitable crash into heartbreak that is looming. It’s about the complexity and vulnerability created knowing a relationship will end but wanting it to last as long as possible even amidst the inevitable forthcoming loss.”
She describes the feeling with one striking image. “‘Straight Into Disaster’ to me feels like being compelled to walk a tightrope over rushing treacherous water,” she says. “While walking you have this beautiful glowing feeling but you’re deeply afraid knowing that you’re going to crash at any time. But the feeling while walking is not just scary – it’s also so powerful and beautiful that you keep walking the tightrope as long as you possibly can. It’s this strange contrast between love and impending doom that inspired the song.”
Listen on Soundcloud here: https://soundcloud.com/aynsleysaxe/straight-into-disaster?si=6d05c2aef6f643eb8ee09df1e074531a&utm_source=clipboard&utm_medium=text&utm_campaign=social_sharing
Saxe produced the track with co-producer Christian Turner at Mill Town Sound in Milton, Ontario. Turner played the acoustic and bass guitars and handled the engineering, mixing and mastering. The pair had already cut several songs for ‘A Thousand Stars’ together, and that familiarity gave the session an easy, unhurried confidence.
“Christian Turner and I put this one down very quickly at Mill Town Sound in Milton, ON,” Saxe says. “Similar to many of the other songs on ‘A Thousand Stars’ he picked out an acoustic guitar part he thought would fit after hearing me perform it and I loved it immediately. Christian tracked the acoustic and bass guitars and then the vocals were added. The recording was completed quite quickly because for this song I felt like less was more. I didn’t want to add piano or background vocals on the recorded track. I wanted the vocals and acoustic guitar to carry the whole song and the bass guitar to ground it. Because Christian and I had recorded other songs for ‘A Thousand Stars’ before ‘Straight Into Disaster’, we had our routine down well and our musical collaboration gelled easily.”
Early listeners have found real comfort inside the storm. One called it “So pure. So ethereal. So heartbreaking. Raw, unadorned heartbreak, delivered with love and delicacy.” Another wrote, “The smooth textures of Aynsley’s voice are somehow healing even as she gently guides me into troubled waters. I feel safe like everything will be okay in the end.”
Saxe edited the music video herself. She set photographs by Allison Clark, who also shot the single’s cover, against stormy oceans, fiery skies and quaking earth.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YyAhR3QxjaY
“For the music video I decided that I would let the weight of the lyrics and the feeling carry it in an artistic dreamlike scape,” she says. “I chose to use a few photos shot by photographer Allison Clark to help portray the feeling of longing and desire juxtaposed on treacherous natural scenes like stormy oceans, fiery backgrounds, and earthquakes. I wanted the feeling of being mesmerized to be portrayed over the larger landscape of powerlessness and doom. In the images I don’t look at the surrounding disaster at all which is impossible to ignore. I’m just looking straight ahead. The one photo in the video I find especially unsettling is where I’m laughing but I’m inside a disastrous landscape with a storm and choppy waves surrounding me. It seems like such a strange image to be laughing amidst such a catastrophe but nods to the lyric ‘We’re living on borrowed time, laughing like we’re out of our minds’. Viewers who have seen my video ‘For Keeps’ will notice that I used some of these same photos in that video which has some of the same themes.”
“Creating videos for my singles that I’ve released for my upcoming album ‘A Thousand Stars’ has opened a larger creative sphere in me than I ever anticipated, and I’ve been loving diving into the editing process.”
‘A Thousand Stars’ has been unfolding one single at a time since June 2025. “Stranger to Myself” explored isolation and reinvention, and “Next Level Love” followed. “For Keeps” dug into longing and heartbreak, “Never Seen Stars Like These Before” celebrated emotional safety and wonder, and “When You Go” faced devastating loss. “Silhouette” caught the ease of falling in love, and “There’s A Raven Waiting” wandered into intuition, mystery and spiritual curiosity. The 12 songs together make up Saxe’s most personal work yet. “I’m getting more personal than comfortable,” she says.
“If ‘A Thousand Stars’ is a journey through the peaks and valleys of romantic love,” she adds, “‘Straight Into Disaster’ is one of the songs in the low valley highlighting deep love juxtaposed against inevitable loss.”
Saxe started piano lessons at age six and wrote her first song at 18, while living on a farm in New Zealand during a youth exchange. Bob Dylan, Joni Mitchell and Leonard Cohen taught her early on how a well-chosen line can light up an emotional truth. She went on to earn an Honours B.A. in English and Film from Western University, and you can hear that literary, cinematic eye in every verse she writes.
Her debut album, ‘Take Me As I Am,’ arrived in 2013 with a launch for a capacity crowd at Toronto’s Hugh’s Room. Its first single, “Stop, Drop & Roll (The Fireman Song),” landed in a province wide commercial for the Saskatchewan Firefighters 2013 Charity Calendar. In 2019, a grant from the Town of Halton Hills helped her record “Beautiful Tomorrow (A Song for Our Planet),” with 20 kids singing backup. Along the way she has composed music for independent films, played sold out shows in Toronto and studied with respected songwriters and vocal coaches across Canada and the United States. Years spent teaching Reiki shaped her intuitive approach to writing, and listeners often say her music feels healing.
That healing comes through most clearly when the song is at its most fragile. Saxe knew the ending from the first kiss, kept her eyes straight ahead and kept walking, and “Straight Into Disaster” makes every step of that tightrope feel worth the fall.
