19 minutes | Monday, 12 February 2024
'The CountryLine Songwriter Series', is where you'll hear from some of the most successful artists and songwriters working in Nashville today. Country music is all about storytelling and this is where you'll discover the stories from the people themselves of how they managed to find their way into such a competitive industry and rise to the top. What motivates and inspires them and what they've learnt along the way.
Born in Wisconsin, Ashley Cooke split her time between California and Florida as a child, eventually settling in the Parkland, Florida area. She started writing original songs from a young age and found herself drawn to country as a high schooler, particularly artists like Taylor Swift, Florida Georgia Line, and Rascal Flatts. Upon her high school graduation, she decided to pursue a music career, enrolling in Nashville's Belmont University. There, she won the school's Country Showcase -- previous winners included Brad Paisley and Tyler Hubbard of Florida Georgia Line --which helped catapult her into Nashville's country music industry after her 2019 college graduation.
Cooke first began building an audience through her social media in 2020, concentrating on her online following during the COVID-19 quarantine. Part of her efforts were focused on building the 615 House collective, but she also concentrated on her own recorded work. That year, she self-released the digital singles "Strangers" -- which was a duet with Daniel Ethridge -- and "Chasin' You”. Cooke then teamed with Back Blocks Music, which put out "Jealous of the Sky" in 2020, before releasing "Sunday Morning Kinda Saturday Night”, the Roman Alexander duet "Between You & Me”, "Under”, and "Already Drank That Beer”, all leading up to the August 2021 release of the Jimmy Robbins-produced “Already Drank That Beer Side A”.
All this activity, along with the Jimmie Allen duet "Good Goodbye”, earned the attention of Big Loud, which signed Ashley Cooke to a record contract and publishing deal in April 2022; both were co-ventures with Back Blocks Music.
In June of 2022 Ashley chatted with CountryLine's Stuart Banford.