ASHLAND — Andrew Coffy had a tough childhood, but he found solace in music.
At 12 years old, his mother was remarried.
“They are no longer together, thank God,” Coffy said. “He used to be abusive to my mom, my sister and me.”
Music became his escape, he said.
His great-grandfather had given him a guitar as a present, but it had gone unused until after one incident, he decided to pick up the guitar and try to play it.
“I had no idea what I was doing or even how to play anything,” Coffy said. “I had no chords coming out and it just sounded like junk.”
Coffy attended church, and each Sunday he sat in the front pew staring at the guitarist, memorizing chord shapes to bring home and try on his own.
“I’d go home and recreate what he did. I kind of taught myself how to play guitar,” Coffy said.
He wrote love songs about what he thought love was supposed to me.
“Growing up, I really didn’t see a lot that in the household,” he said. “There was a lot of screaming, fighting.
“I wrote the love songs about what I though true love would look like.”
Later in 2011, while he was attending Akron University, Coffy was struck by a driver.
“It was my first semester,” Coffy remembered. “A guy ran a red light and hit me at 45 miles per hour.”
He spent a month in a hospital bed. When he left the hospital, he decided his life should be dedicated to writing music.
“The fact that my life could have ended then, I want to do something that is meaningful and can bring people joy or speak to people in a way,” Coffy said. “I want to continue this music thing because I was given a gift for it. So why not use it?”
Coffy began making music. His first record, “Finding Home” was published in March 2015 under the name Exhale Desire.
Coffy published his second record, Dec. 9 — a 10-track album titled “Million Lights.”
He will hold an album release on Feb. 15 at Ashland High School’s theater. The free show will begin at 6 p.m.
“I’ve been working on the songs on the album since 2011,” he said.
The oldest song on the album, Taking Breaths, was created after Coffy sat in a poetry cafe in Akron called Versified Expressions.
“I heard poet. One of his lines stuck out to me,” he said. “The line was ‘I shed a tear on every word I write.’ I went up to him afterwards and asked if I could use it in a song. From that tiny little phrase I made a whole song out of it.”
On another track, he raps on the song Fell Apart.
His college roommate, Chris Howard would rap to songs. One day, he and Chris wrote a song together, that song was Fell Apart.
“It was probably about 24 takes (to get the song recorded),” Coffy said. “I had to learn how to breathe right as to not run out of air.”
Coffy’s first full-length album was a big project. He took out a loan to pay for the expenses of the album, which included a flight to the recording studio in Florida and the utilization of multiple artists and genre styles, which include country, piano ballads, love songs and others.
“I feel like this appeals to a lot of people and that is really exciting to me.”
Exhale Desire’s music is available on most media players, including iTunes, Spotify, Google Play and Amazon.