Ahead of her UK and European tour, we interview Ashley Cooke about her debut album, her artistry in relation to social media and her UK fan base.
Hi Ashley! You’re coming back to the UK soon – it’s so exciting, how are you feeling for it?
Oh my goodness, I’m so excited. We’re currently over in Europe, we’re in Copenhagen in Denmark, so I’m already getting in the zone. I’m so excited to get to come back, and I hope I get to see some of the people I got to see for C2C. We’re doing a more full band situation this time, so it’ll be a different aspect than what C2C was. I’m really excited to get back there and see everybody.
I feel the UK fans need the full experience of your music, so that’s very exciting. The first time I interviewed you was in 2021 and so much has happened since then – how are you processing it all?
It’s been a year – no pun intended. It’s definitely been wild, it’s been really fun to see everybody and play shows and release a lot of music. It’s been cool to build more of the fan base than I ever really imagined, it’s still very much growing every single day. It’s been cool and fun to see a lot of people believe in my music and come out and buy a ticket to a headline show and travel really long distances to see you. I’m honoured that they believe in my music and what I’m doing.
It must have been a little bit strange because I feel like your career took off in and during 2020, where we were all tentatively getting back into the world, but your music was taking off on line in such a huge way.
Definitely strange, I won’t lie. I was in the airport flying over here a couple of days ago and this girl, Celine, from Austria was like ‘oh my gosh, are you that girl from TikTok with the music?’ Yeah, and she’d been following me this whole time. Like you’re saying, people have been following me online for a very long time and so, even though, it feels like this has all happened over the last year or two in the industry and touring, and realising that connection one and one and with the crowds and stuff. It’s been a weird adjustment going from live streams to going to play shows every night. It’s been very fun and processing it is definitely interesting. It’s been good. Everything is nothing but good, except that sleeping is hard. Honestly, you’re only young once, so you may as well tour and go to Europe and the UK.
You’ll never regret that! Going back to that person recognising you on TikTok – obviously that was the way your music blew up, but there’s so much more depth to your music than that, ‘Shot in the Dark’ is lengthy and vulnerable, so how have you been able to rationalise that dichotomy?
I mean, what you just said, is exactly what my goal was for this project. Of course, in the beginning, when people would call me a TikTok artist or dismiss me as one, of course, it was hard and I’d push back against it, like ‘No, I’ve been doing this, since I was 11 years old,’ but now I have really come to terms with it as such a blessing. A lot of people and friends that I have would kill to be in my position, even two years ago, and now it’s huge. Social media is now just a really cool way to get more eyeballs on my music. My goal with the first album was just to make music where however they found it – on TikTok or a burnt CD somewhere – they could connect with it and it felt real, it’s songwriting and quality music. As long as I create music that transcended past the medium people found it on, I’m proud of it and I hope that I did that.
Shot in the Dark was 24 songs long – it’s a lengthy project – what did you want fans to take away from it and why such a lengthy project? How did you find structuring the project?
It was a weird process – I’ve never compiled an album before. I thought what would I want people to hear first and it was a sonic journey, to say the least. I’d say the main Easter Egg, or interesting fact that I put on the album – my lucky number is number twelve and that’s halfway through the album. It’s my dad’s sports number in high school and it’s my birthday day and I’ve just always loved the number twelve. That song just happened to be the only song that I wrote completely by myself on the project, it’s a song called ‘Next To You.’ I really wanted that song to be the separator between the first and second part, I was thinking about it in terms of a vinyl where there’s two discs. There wasn’t an art to the tracklisting of it, but it was to fun to kind of formulate that together and I hope that it does flow.
There’s so much thought that’s gone into the project, even down to the collaborations. I’m sure there would have been people lining up to feature on this project but you were very intentional about who was featured. Can you talk about selecting those artists, they all have such interesting voices?
So, obviously the main collaboration was Brett Young with ‘Never Til Now’ which was very cool and I’m very proud of that song. Jackson Dean – he’s just incredible – with him and Nate Smith, I really wanted to get artists that I believed in and were in my class too, you know young artists who maybe haven’t become known to the masses yet, but they’re going to be soon. They’re my friends too and they’re people I really believe in. Jackson and I were actually asked to do a song together for a publishing awards show here in Nashville, so we did a cover of ‘Don’t Think Jesus’ by Morgan Wallen and people loved our vocals and how we sounded together, so I said to him that we should record one together. That’s how ‘What Are You On Fire About’ came together. Jackson’s voice is so unique, he’s one of the coolest people you’ll ever encounter, he’s got a very old soul and he’s only 22. We got to tour together on the Luke Bryan tour and play that song live. His voice is so unique and so cool that I just had to have him on the record.
Nate Smith is one of the best humans you’ll ever encounter. He’s such a great dude, he’s so talented. I’ve been such a fan of him since we did radio shows together. I actually reached out to him as a friend and sent him a bunch of songs to choose from and he selected ‘See You Around.’ That’s fun, because he didn’t just say yes to the project but he really chose the one that he loved.
Last but not least, Colbie Caillat, she’s such an incredible artist and inspiration. I’ve always just loved her so much and growing up I was such a fan of her music. People would tell me I had a similar tone and style to my voice, so I always dreamed about collaborating with her. I heard she moved to Nashville and I wanted to be in her orbit, so my producer Jimmy Robbins is good friends with her, so we set up a write. We met in that writing room and we wrote ‘Mean Girl’ together and initially I didn’t know if she’d want to be on the song, or just a writer, so I asked her to be a part of the song and she said yes and now we’re really great friends.
We really all have become friends and we cheer each other on and it’s great to have those collaborators. It’s been very fun and I’m proud of every single one of them.
You’re really part of this vanguard of artists changing the sound in Nashville and with all those artists you can track different changes to the Nashville sound. I also wanted to talk to you about ‘Enough to Leave’ – that song destroys me, so where did that song come from?
Crazy enough, that song is one everyone requests at every live show, consistently. I get it. It’s one of those songs that I needed to hear, whether I wrote it or not, it just kind of felt like nothing I’d heard in a song before. Long story short, I was in multiple toxic relationships, and there was one where he was so kind and loving always, but it was not great when it was not great. I knew it wasn’t right long term and I called my mum one day and I said, ‘look I really love him, but I know it’s not right, but it’s hard because the way that he is, he’s manipulative and he’ll say that you don’t love me if you leave.’ My mum said ‘well Ash, I think the only way that you can love somebody if it’s not right is if you leave and you let them go and let them find the person who is right for them.’ I was on the road on tour and I was in a hotel and I wrote that chorus because I couldn’t get it out of my head. I brought it back to Nashville and found my love for it in a room with other writers. That song is very special.
You’ve got the UK coming up but what else is on the cards for this year?
I would love to put out more music this year, but we’ll see what happens. I’ve already written enough to fill a second album, but I don’t know. We haven’t worked out what we want to do in terms of that yet, this year is really full in terms of touring. I’m opening up for Jordan Davis pretty much the entire year, starting with the UK and Europe, then the US and Canada. My goal for this year was to double down on stuff I had released the past year and branch out with my fan base, maybe another headline tour later this year.
Congratulations and we can’t wait to see you on the road with Jordan!
