Ashley Cooke Is Taking It All In

Ashley Cooke is not the type to take things for granted. When she logs on to Zoom to chat, she’s calling from a tour bus, en route to an evening show with Kane Brown. The country singer-songwriter thinks they’ve arrived in Albany — but she’s not entirely sure.

If things feel like a bit of a blur these days for the 27-year-old artist, it’s understandable; her 2023 release, “your place,” catapulted her to a new threshold of visibility. The music video for the tell-off anthem has surpassed 5 million views and accrued over 60 million streams on Spotify. The song also earned the Big Loud artist her first CMT Award in the category of Breakthrough Female Video of the Year in 2024. In late 2024, she embarked on a two-leg headlining tour, a 29-date trek that spilled into 2025 and saw her playing to rooms in Chicago, Boston, and New York.

As busy as she is, she’s making a conscious effort to be in the moment. “I really, actively pick a place in the set to be like, ‘Hey, look around. You're not going to see this for the rest of your life,” she says. “For moments like the CMT Award or my very first No. 1 song, I tried to be as present as I possibly could be.”

Growing up in Los Angeles — and playing music with her sister in a duo that put her onstage as early as age 11 — she was surrounded by peers working on Disney and Nickelodeon shows, hoisting bedazzled mics, and chasing pop dreams.

“I wanted to write songs from my journal and put them into melodies, and I wanted to talk about stories,” she recalls. “I naturally cared more about the lyrics than I did about the dance moves and the outfits… and everybody around me that was listening to the music that I was writing said, ‘It sounds like you write country music.’”

She moved to Nashville in 2015, and like so many other songwriters hoping to make it there, Cooke spent the better part of a decade immersing herself in the idiosyncratic mechanisms of Music Row, working her way into rooms with sought-after figures like Lori McKenna. She released her debut album with Big Loud, Already Drank That Beer, in 2022. Her next release, 2023’s shot in the dark, was an expansive 24 tracks, and she confirms that she’s already working on “a bunch of new stuff.”

Cooke has sometimes referred to her sound as “two-lane pop,” a description that invokes the visual of balancing hooky melodies in rootsy, deeply personal song structure. She’s as game to jump on a track with country figures like Brett Young as she is to collaborate with Joe Jonas, who she says has been “wanting to break into country more and more.”

The resulting song with the Jonas Brother and DNCE member, February 2025’s “All I Forgot,” walks the line of many country songs that came before it: the two trade off candid lines about having one drink too many, missing an ex, messing up, and seeing all the regrets in the stark light of morning.

When I went to Toronto to film content with Joe [Jonas] for the song, I saw Kevin Sr. again, and we were like, ‘Wait a minute. We know each other.’

“We became great friends throughout the process, and he's so cool, so normal, and so nice,” she says. “I think it's even more refreshing when you get to be around people that have been through the lives that they've been through and still come out really fun and super down to earth.”

The collaboration was something of a full-circle moment, too. Cooke was the right age to be a Jonas Brothers fan growing up, and her best friend in Los Angeles was Noah Cyrus (whose sister Miley was dating his brother Nick). Between overlapping social circles and her time performing with her sister as a teenager, she formed a “grapevine connection” to the trio of brothers. “When I went to Toronto to film content with Joe for the song, I saw Kevin Sr. again, and we were like, ‘Wait a minute. We know each other. This is weird,’” she remembers. “It was one of those moments of childhood lives intertwining with adulthood.”

Even so, the road that would reconnect her with the Jonas Brothers all these years later was winding. “A phenomenal writer named JKash wrote the song; I loved it, and Charlie Puth heard it when JKash was in the studio with him.” Puth became a co-producer on the track, and “All I Forgot” moved something closer to what she described as a song that demanded “pop duet flavor.” When the time came to find a collaborator, Joe Jonas said yes.

A few years ago, it might have been more difficult to get people excited about a song that tossed genre parameters to the wind, but Cooke thinks we’re living in the “most beautiful time in the music industry.” She’s developed strong working relationships with people she once held as North Star songwriters, like Emily Weisband, whose similarly unguarded repertoire includes cuts on the spectrum of artists from Carly Pearce to BTS.

I don't want to chase anything that doesn't feel just like me.

For Cooke, who recalls enthusiastically saying yes to everything when she first arrived in Nashville at the age of 18, practicing selectivity in recent years has helped her tap into her own sense of authenticity. “As so many different genres are coming into country, and people are trying new things, I don't want to chase anything that doesn't feel just like me,” she says.

She describes herself as a perfectionist, referencing Kelsea Ballerini’s quip about being a “recovering people-pleaser.” Navigating the inner workings of Nashville — a city with a primary industry still uniquely dominated by terrestrial radio — has historically been more challenging to young women. Just a decade ago, radio consultant Keith Hill advocated for stations to avoid playing songs by female artists back-to-back, comparing his ideal vision of country radio to salad: male artists as the lettuce, female artists as the occasional tomato.

While aware this line of thinking hasn’t been entirely stamped out in the years since, Cooke is undeterred, focusing on creating as well as she can. She’s grateful for the women who paved the way, kicking down doors so that artists like her could walk through more easily.

“Getting to collaborate with people that just get it, whether it's just friends that know what you're going through in your life or the fact that they were around for Tomato-gate, they understand all of that and what went down,” she says. “We've had a lot of women before us trailblaze and be able to fight for it… I feel like I get to be in an era of benefiting from the trailblazers before me.”

As country music’s next chapter is being written, Cooke is happy to be one of the people holding the pen.