DJ Ashba was born on November 10, 1972, in Monticello, Indiana. The guitarist and songwriter co-founded Sixx AM with bassist Nikki Sixx and singer-producer James Michael. Their 2007 debut, The Heroin Diaries Soundtrack, included “Life Is Beautiful,” which Ashba co-wrote and played guitar on. The partnership gave him room to help shape songs from their first ideas through to the finished recordings.
His first music lessons came from his mother, a classical piano teacher. In a 2012 interview with Glide, Ashba described moving from piano to drums before taking up guitar. He paid for a white Harmony Flying V from the Sears catalog by detasseling corn during the summer. Even the trips to work became lessons: a guitarist he knew carved a fretboard into the back of a bus seat and showed him chord shapes. Ashba would take those shapes home to practice, then return the next day to learn another.
Los Angeles brought cover-band gigs and construction work before a record deal. Recalling that period in a Schecter interview republished on his website in 2023, Ashba said he was playing demos for his boss when a client overheard them and signed him to an independent label. His instrumental solo debut, Addiction to the Friction, arrived in 1996. He later co-founded Beautiful Creatures, whose self-titled debut followed in 2001.
The collaboration behind Sixx AM grew out of Ashba’s songwriting work with Sixx. As Ashba explained to Guitar World in 2016, Sixx brought his diaries into the studio, and they began imagining songs that could accompany the book. Initially, they considered using a different singer on each track. Michael was a producer Ashba already knew; hearing his vocals convinced them they had found their singer. The three wrote the debut together, establishing a partnership that continued beyond the book that had brought them into the studio.
Ashba joined Guns N’ Roses in 2009, balancing that role with Sixx AM’s recording work. On the latter band’s 2014 album, Modern Vintage, his guitar parts remained open to revision even after he had played them. He told Legendary Rock Interviews that he saved direct guitar signals so the performances could be sent through different amplifiers later, allowing the sound to change through the mixing stage. “We are never married to the tone,” he explained. Most of the guitars were Les Pauls, and his signature model’s kill switch supplied the interruptions heard at the beginning of the solo in “Stars.” The playing and the treatment of the sound were separate creative decisions.
He left Guns N’ Roses in 2015 to devote more time to Sixx AM and his family. Looking back in the 2016 Guitar World interview, Ashba said playing shows behind Modern Vintage had helped convince the trio to make Sixx AM their full-time focus. That decision also affected their writing: they approached the next recordings with live performance in mind, building material they wanted to take onstage.
The result included two albums released in 2016, Prayers for the Damned and Prayers for the Blessed. Written and recorded together, they were issued separately as companion records. Ashba’s contribution extended to their artwork: he designed both covers, which were intended to fit together into a single image.
