The letters are lowercase but the emotion and vulnerability of Ashley Cooke’s self-titled sophomore album is all caps and underlined. The singer recently joined Rob + Holly to unpack the emotional weight of the new project during the 'Friday Night Takeover,' and delved into the inspiration behind her choices.
Ashley reveals that she wrote many of the songs while in the "messy middle" of a real-life relationship and a subsequent breakup. “Literally, I wrote a lot of these songs with and about somebody that I was in a relationship with throughout the whole record. And yeah, there's just a lot of very specific messy details in it,” she reveals.
“Even the last song on the record is called ‘the girl who cried wolf,’ and that song wasn't supposed to be on the record, the record was done, it was done with 14 songs ready to go, and then me and this person broke up again and got back together again and then broke up again, and I was just so fed up with it, and I was so sick of it,” she adds. “A lot of the songs on the record at that point were more like love song sounding stuff, it was more stuff about like missing him, yearning for him, all the things, and so I was like, I have to write the song and just get it out.”
Despite the fear of being "naked in front of a crowd," Ashley emphasizes her decision to lean into vulnerability rather than "water down" her art, hoping that listeners will relate to the raw, real-time experiences she documented.
“All that to say, there's a lot of details on the record for sure,” Cooke says. “But the reason I named it like a self-titled record is because it feels like it also just dives deep into my patterns.”
“If I don't take the risk and just take a deep breath and go, ‘OK, this is gonna be really weird for a season,’ and I'm gonna feel like I'm naked in front of a crowd every single night. If it's gonna feel like that for a minute, and people are gonna know way too much about my life than I would have ever thought so, but there's kind of a path you gotta choose as an artist to go down.”
To hear much more from Ashely Cooke check out the full interview above. ashley cooke is now available everywhere.
