Ashley Cooke opens up on self-titled sophomore album

Ashley Cooke has released her self-titled sophomore album via Big Loud Records and Back Blocks Music, a record she describes as letting fans in deeper than she's ever gone before. Written during a season of falling in and out of love, the coming-of-age project traces what Cooke was learning about her own patterns in real time rather than offering conclusions after the fact.

The approach was a sharp turn from her debut. "I sat down with some of my closest friends and favorite co-writers," Cooke told MusicRow, describing sessions that happened on retreats, in her living room and on the tour bus rather than inside Music Row's usual pitch-meeting writing rooms. That looser process produced opener "if i'm being honest," built from what she calls a word-vomiting session with two co-writers, the kind of admissions she jokes might spill out after "too much wine on a first date."

She co-wrote all 15 tracks in total, working with hitmakers including Kyle Sturrock, Emily Weisband and Chase McGill, along with a session at Liz Rose's house alongside Lori McKenna and Hillary Lindsey that produced "between the lines," a song built around everything left unsaid in a relationship's early stages.

The album's final track, "the girl who cried wolf," almost didn't make the record at all. Cooke wrote it after the relationship she'd been chronicling ended just as the album was headed to mastering. "We basically called it off, and I was in my head and spiraling," she said, and she called the label the next day to insist the song be added to the record.

Not every song came from heartbreak. Current single "baby blues" was written on the last day of a writing retreat with Seth Ennis, Johnny Clawson, Joe Fox and Kyle Sturrock, after what Cooke admits was one too many nights out. "We were all very hungover from drinking the night before," she said, and the song "kind of just fell out of us." After she posted the demo on social media, fans pushed it into her live set before it became a proper single; it has since climbed the country charts and passed 55 million global streams.

Cooke is marking the release with the "cities that made me tour," a run of acoustic pop-up shows that follows her acoustic pop-up run announced for August and traces cities tied to her own biography: Milwaukee, where she was born, and West Lafayette, Indiana, where her parents first met, alongside stops in Nashville, Pleasanton, Studio City, Sarasota and Parkland. She'll follow with her third headlining run, the Baby Blues World Tour, launching next month across the U.S. and U.K., including a February 25 stop at Nashville's Ryman Auditorium.

For all the new songs and shows built around it, Cooke says the album's real project is a clearer picture of who she is off stage. "This record really allows you to get to know Ashley the person, not Ashley the artist," she said. The album joins the rest of this week's new country releases on the release calendar.