This week, Ashland Craft will release her debut album – Travelin’ Kind. Ahead of the release of the record, we spoke to Ashland about the experience of creating the project, working with Jonathan Singleton and what she wanted to say through the album. Full interview below.
Hi, Ashland – it’s the final countdown to the album release, how are you feeling?
Oh, my goodness, every time I think about it, I’m just getting anxious. There’s all the good feelings, all the things that I could have ever imagined feeling when I’m about to release my first album.
It’s such a strong project. I think it’s going to really take off. It’s such a huge sound, can you talk about creating that during lockdown when you didn’t always have your band around?
Right. I think all the songs kind of fell into their own little place on the record. Thankfully, I wanted it to be super dynamic, in a sense of just keeping you interested the whole time, where you keep wondering what the next song is going to be. I felt like everything kind of had its own pocket, I felt some songs were very appropriate – being edgy and hard and in your face – but then I also had the ones where I felt like I really wanted to get back to my roots and back to that really traditional country sound, like ‘Leaving You Again’ which is one of my top favourite songs and ‘Highway Like Me.’
I loved that last one. I know you collaborated with Marcus King on that one – how did he come to be a part of that one? I feel like he really added something special to it.
Absolutely. I’m so thankful he wanted to be a part of it. We were actually talking about who could be good to feature on a song. I knew I wanted it to be somebody soulful. I knew I wanted it to be somebody that could really, really tell the story and that sense of longing that you feel on the road. Somebody mentioned Marcus King and I thought that was so funny, because him and I are literally from the same area. We both grew up in a small town in South Carolina and we went to the same rival high schools, it’s insane. I didn’t know all this actually – I knew that he was in our music circuit back in the Carolinas, but once we actually got together and he was tracking that song and we got to meet, we started going over all the things from back home. I didn’t realise we were literally from the same place, so that made it even more special to have somebody who was from home. It’s kind of a little piece of home on the project, and I’m just so thankful he wanted to be a part of it.
Going back to just how strong this project is. You worked with Jonathan Singleton, who is obviously an icon in Nashville. What did he give to the project and what did he bring out of you?
Jonathan Singleton first is an amazing songwriter and amazing person and musician. I was introduced to him when I first moved to town through a guy named Bradley Jordan with Peachtree entertainment. I didn’t know what to expect out of the whole interaction, I also didn’t realise that he had written a lot of my favourite songs on the radio – I wasn’t one that dove into a lot of the songwriting stuff before I moved, because I didn’t really consider myself a songwriter. I thought I was very mediocre at this. When I first came to town and met him, it was just an amazing thing, because I really didn’t know what to expect moving here and getting into the songwriting process. I was like ‘Okay, how does this whole thing work?’ He was amazing, he walked me through the whole thing as best as he could every time we wrote. More importantly, he just let me be myself, he really was focused on ‘Okay, what do you want to say in this? We could say this, but what would you say?’ I think that was probably the most important thing for me, because it really gave me a sense of who I was and what I wanted to say, and being confident in that. I’m thankful that I’ve had amazing mentors like Jonathan. He helped me produce the whole album and his ideas are just amazing. In that process, he is very communicative and he’s got very good ideas. He will also throw his ideas out there, and we’ll find a healthy balance.
I guess he brings out your true essence rather than imprinting himself on your sound. I was looking through the tracklist and you’ve penned all the tracks apart from two. It was interesting because those two tracks are from incredibly talented but slightly lesser-known songwriters, so how did those come to you?
So I met Jenna at 50 Egg Music, which is my publishing company but is also where Jonathan is. When I started writing, she was there – me and her are the only two females over there that are writing – so, it was natural that we became two of the best friends. I believe it was one of the first times for Jonathan and Jenna writing, if not the first time and they wrote ‘Your Momma Still Does’ and I believe we were all in the pub house that day and they were like, ‘Hey, do you want to listen to this song that we just wrote? We’re curious if you would want to cut it.’ Of course, I said absolutely because that song has such a cool angle that I’d never heard before.
The other two songwriters on ‘Day By Day’ – which is the other track that’s an outside cut – they’re actually two of my very best friends that I met back in 2017 when I did The Voice, and we met through the whole audition process. They are two very talented singer songwriters – Tori Allen, one of the girls, that’s a songwriter on it, she played the song live and it just was stuck in my head. She’s her own artist as well, so I was waiting to feel out what she was planning on doing with it. She threw it out there that it wasn’t really in the books for her her current project, so I said ‘I really am obsessed with this song and I would love to cut it’ – taking something day by day is literally what I say every single day of my life. It’s what I live by. Even though this was about a relationship, I think, overall, it’s a message that I wanted to get out there, if not for anybody else, even just for myself – a reminder that life is tough and sometimes you just got to take one step at a time. So, both of those scenarios were very unexpected, but I’m so grateful. I felt like they added so much to the project.
They fit seamlessly into the project, which is testament to the fact that you clearly knew from the offset what kind of artist you wanted to be – that’s quite rare for a debut album. Obviously it’s been a few years since The Voice, so are you happy that it’s all happened now, you’ve had some time to figure out what your sound is what you kind of want to put out.
I know, that’s the crazy thing. I will say I’m fortunate enough to feel like all of these songs kind of felt right. As we were moving forward in this process, I didn’t know ‘Travelin’ Kind’ was necessarily going to be the title track, but for some reason, in my gut, I had a gut feeling that it could be. The more we continued to write over the next two years, everything just seemed to lend a hand to that. Honestly, when it came down to picking songs in the tracklist, it was not hard. I think in my heart I knew already what was meant to go on the first album. I was excited to share it, I think this is definitely where I have been in life and where I’m at now and where I will be probably for the next couple years – travelling on the road – I hope so anyway. This is what I love to do and it’s all I’ve ever wanted to do and what I live for, so I felt like it was only appropriate to have that as the title. Even though it’s not necessarily a concept album, I definitely wanted all the songs to have a flow and dynamic, whether that’s in the story or in the melody or lyrically, I wanted there to be some kind of flow, where it took you on a little bit of a journey.
That’s definitely the case, I feel like I listen to the project and you can find out exactly who you are in terms of your artistry, but also in terms of who you are as person and what you’re about. I guess now it’s just about getting back on the road and getting this project out. How excited are you to tour and actually have it out and see the live response?
We’ve gotten to play a lot of the songs from the record. We’ve played a lot of the ones that we released early on, but then some that aren’t necessarily out yet. It’s been cool to kind of gauge the audience and see how they react and hear people’s stories afterwards and how they connect to the song specifically. It does make me feel like I’m moving in the right direction at least speaking to people that hopefully can relate to me. I’m thankful that I’m getting to show who I am as a person. I think that’s first and foremost for me.
100%, well, I’m really excited for you and congratulations again.
