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I’m going to take you back in time to a wonderful period called the early 2000s. Those were the good old days, when the only social media page you had to manage was MySpace and boy bands ruled the airwaves.
One of the forgotten guy groups of the decade is O-Town, the five dudes who formed a band after trying out through MTV’s reality show Making the Band. Turns out, these guys had some amazing tunes, even if “Liquid Dreams” was far too R-rated for my 10-year-old brain to wrap itself around.
In every boy band there was the regulation hottie. The Backstreet Boys had Nick Carter. NSYNC had Justin Timberlake. And O-Town had Ashley Parker Angel.
Besides having a name that any 10-year-old girl would give up all her Lisa Frank stickers for, his blonde spiky hair got every girl swooning. And APA (as I have just nicknamed him) just got better with age. Luckily for us, he also seems to be allergic to clothing.
Exhibit A:
https://www.instagram.com/p/BIlIFKGjorY/?taken-by=ashley_parker_angel&hl=en
Exhibit B:
https://www.instagram.com/p/BIdZeM1jrEg/?taken-by=ashley_parker_angel&hl=en
Exhibit C:
https://www.instagram.com/p/BHn8S-IjBOs/?taken-by=ashley_parker_angel&hl=en
Exhibit D:
https://www.instagram.com/p/BGxoUZPHaxd/?taken-by=ashley_parker_angel&hl=en
Exhibit E:
https://www.instagram.com/p/BGH8avAHa7R/?taken-by=ashley_parker_angel&hl=en
Your honor, I rest my case.
Though the band went kaput after just two albums, Ashley tried to continue his music career as a solo artist. In 2004, he scored a record deal and began filming an MT reality show following his solo career. The series also followed him as he became a father to son Lyric with his then-fiancée, but the couple didn’t work out. (Fun fact: Lyric appeared on American Horror Story: Hotel as Lachlan Drake, the son of Cheyenne Jackson’s character who buys the Hotel Cortez).
Since then, he’s kept singing and dancing in musicals. He joined the cast of Hairspray on Broadway in 2007 and then went around the country with the touring cast of Wicked.
