Ashley Cooke on Debut Album After 'Crazy' Year: 'You Feel Like Yourself, but in Fancier Clothes' (Exclusive)

It’s been a year for Ashley Cooke. 

The 26-year-old country singer released her debut, double album Shot in the Dark on July 21— all while opening up for Luke Bryan on tour after playing Nissan Stadium during the CMT Awards in June and making both her Opry and Ryman debuts in April.

“It’s insane, nuts,” muses Cooke, who grew up moving from California to Florida and then to Nashville, Tennessee, where she attended Belmont University to study marketing.

“Kenny Chesney pulled me up on stage to sing with him at my hometown festival in Florida. I mean, I'm opening up for Luke Bryan. I feel like there've been huge moments that have been really exciting and awesome, but I think to me, the biggest moments have been whichever show, big or small, with a bunch of people singing back to me,” she says.

Cooke, who first took off on TikTok during the pandemic, has grown her audience widely beyond the social media app, quickly becoming a fast-rising star in the country world.

Perhaps her most-well known single is “It’s Been a Year,” in which Cooke nostalgically sings about time gone by while still celebrating all that can happen in 365 days. 

“Most people don't even know the actual story behind it because the song is just about the craziness of the last year, two years of your life. Up and down, and it's just a lot of change, especially at this age,” she explains. “[But] I was on my way to a writing session in Nashville and my mom called me. She was like, ‘Hey, I hate to say this to you, but your grandma has breast cancer again,’ and my mom was crying. I was in my car, thinking about the last time I had seen my grandma. I realized that it was exactly a year ago from that day.”

Knowing she had a writing session to focus on, Cooke did her best to compartmentalize. 

“And then I walk into the writing room, not saying a single thing about it. And one of my co-writers was like, ‘Hey, I have this weird idea for a song. I don't know if it'll ever be anything, but it's called, ‘It's Been a Year,'” she recalls.

Cooke was blown away by the serendipity. The song was written immediately, with the very first verse dedicated to Cooke’s grandparents. And the “divine influence" surrounding the single, as Cooke calls it now, didn’t stop there. 

“The day that I released ‘It's Been a Year,’ it's so weird. My grandma didn't even know. She called my mom on that day saying she was declared in remission for breast cancer. That, to me, was the biggest moment.” 

Shot in the Dark boasts 24 tracks, "It’s Been a Year" included, and Cooke says each song was carefully selected in order to make the project feel whole and to tell a story.

“This is my first album, so it was a new process for me. We wrote probably, gosh, 50, 60, 70 songs. We whittled down, and then we whittled it down a little more, and we got to 24 and I sat with the 24 songs," says Cooke. "All of these songs feel so real and accurate and cohesive and they just tell a story and they make so much sense for my life and it's so hard for me to think about letting one of them go.”

Cooke, rightfully so, is on top of the world with the milestone release — and she knows it. But she’s delightfully humble; dedicated in her pursuit to stay true to Ashley, and not anybody else. 

“You just feel like yourself, but in fancier clothes, you know what I mean?” she asks. “There is this level of, 'I'm on a stage and you're watching me,' but I want to be able to just sit down and have coffee with people and make them feel like they know me, even if I am the person on the stage.”

The solution?

“I’m just figuring that out,” says Cooke. “You want to keep the sparkle.”