Country singer Ashley Cooke spends every other Wednesday at 2:30 p.m. pouring her heart out off West End Avenue.
Boys. Red flags. Self-doubt. People-pleasing tendencies. Her therapist, Frances, has heard it all.
The standing appointment became the emotional blueprint for her eponymous album, "ashley cooke."
And track four, "Famous to Frances," is a tribute to the therapist who helped her through the ups and downs.She sings: "You're just a nickname to most of my friends / My mom and dad don't know you exist / But you're famous to Frances."
At some point, Cooke stopped pretending she was fine and turned her heartbreak, healing and hard-earned self-awareness into polished, pop-country hooks across 15 songs.
"'Famous to Frances' is one of my favorites
because it's just so real and, yes, my therapist's actual name is Frances," Cooke said from a Hampton Social booth in downtown Nashville.
Dressed in denim that matches the baby-blue aesthetic inspired by her lead single, "Baby Blues," she looks every bit the part of this new era. It's also the first time, she says, listeners will meet "Ash," not just Ashley Cooke the artist.
'If I'm Being Honest'
"If I'm betting on someone, I'm betting on Ashley," country music veteran Dann Huff said on the phone from his vacation spot in Glasgow, Scotland.
Huff — the legendary producer and guitarist whose credits include Taylor Swift, Keith Urban, Faith Hill, Shania Twain, Carrie Underwood and Rascal Flatts — was inducted into the Musicians Hall of Fame in April. While much of Nashville is searching for the next country-pop blonde with diary-like songs and mainstream appeal, Huff and Cooke's other collaborators told The Tennessean that the "Baby Blues" singer brings unique songwriting chops to the table, a talent that could push the industry forward.
"For being so young, she knows who she is," Huff said. "And she lets her 'no' be known very quickly. That, in and of itself, is golden, because you don't waste your time circling around something that she doesn't believe in."
Their partnership started with a cold call and a meeting at a Brentwood Starbucks. Cooke later sent him several songs. What he heard was an artist with a distinct point of view, seemingly endless ideas and fresh ways of approaching stories country music has told for decades. Cooke has a knack for surprising song titles that lend layered meaning to the lyrics, which are often tinged with sardonic references honed with feedback from live performances.
Cooke and Huff recorded this latest album in small batches of two or three songs. Each session informed the next as Cooke continued writing, touring and testing material. Huff described the 29-year-old star as fearless, funny and hard to put in just one musical box.
"She's a thinker," Huff said. "She has an ability to say things just differently from the rest of her class."
'The Girl Who Cried Wolf'
Cooke knew exactly who she wanted to co-write her sophomore album.
She invited her closest collaborators — Johnny Clawson, Kyle Sturrock, Emily Weisband, Lauren Hungate, Joe Fox and Seth Ennis — into her home and on writing retreats. Then she reached out to acclaimed writers Ashley Gorley, Lori McKenna, Hillary Lindsey, Liz Rose, Chase McGill and JP Saxe, three of whom, Gorley, Rose and Lindsey, have worked with Taylor Swift. But Cooke isn't trying to be the next Swift. This album is all about Ash and her own approach to confessional writing.
Cooke's main goal, she said, was to tell the truth over chasing commercial hits. The irony is that the more honest Cooke has become, the bigger her audience has grown. With more than 700 million global streams and 3 million followers across social platforms, the girl with piercing blue eyes has built an audience by writing the songs she needed to hear herself.
"I wasn't just writing the best title of the day," Cooke said. "I was walking into the rooms, venting to my friends about the situations that I was currently going through and somehow songs came out of that."
In "Excuses," she lists off reasons to hear her ex's voice again: "Are my earrings in your Bronco?" "Do you want your sweatshirt back?" "My mom got some bad news about her heart," and "I checked out a new bar downtown." Cooke's "finger slipped" when she tried to call her sister, but calls the boyfriend that comes in and out of her life like a boomerang.
In "Dance Around It," two exes know they "can't fix it," but also "can't admit it," so they spend the night together in a vibey, whiskey-soaked haze, choosing chemistry over closure. "I'm Up and I'm Down" swings between "I hate you" and "I miss you" before another late-night invitation. "Between the Lines" begs for someone to hear what she can't quite bring herself to say aloud: "I know I said let's just be friends and keep it casual... I love you."
Then, there's the emotional centerpiece "Johnny 'n June." Fans may think the title is about country royalty.
It's not.
The title is word play: Johnny in June.
"It's a clever song about a guy named Johnny in the month of June, but it was tough to write because I was experiencing it as I was writing it," the singer-songwriter said.
Month by month, Cooke chronicled the relationship she couldn't outrun. She sings that she "ran away the way I always do," before later wondering whether she'll "ever feel that again."
Unlike her 2023 debut album, "shot in the dark," which introduced her as one of country's fastest-rising storytellers and produced her first No. 1 country radio hit, "your place," "ashley cooke" wasn't written from the other side of heartbreak. It was written while she was in the middle of it.
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'Man Behind the Glass'
Cooke was venting to frequent collaborator Emily Weisband about a boy giving mixed signals when Weisband texted back: "Dang, it feels like he's behind a glass wall. He's so close, but you just can't get to him."
The late-night text sparked track nine.
"Ashley said, 'Dang, that would be a really cool song if we wrote 'Man Behind the Glass' or something like that,'" Weisband told The Tennessean.
Weeks later, Cooke brought the idea into a writing session with Weisband and singer-songwriter JP Saxe. As the song took shape, Saxe connected with it enough that he volunteered to record the duet before anyone asked.
For Weisband — whose songwriting credits include BTS, Camila Cabello, Keith Urban, P!nk, Thomas Rhett and Hillary Scott — moments like that explain why Cooke has become one of her favorite collaborators.
"What really sets Ashley apart is just how much she knows herself," Weisband said. "She can tell you in the room, 'Yeah, that's not me. I wouldn't say that.' She's interested in unique ideas. If you have a weird title, she's really good at embracing that and saying, 'How do we write that weird title in the most relatable way possible?'"
Cooke has written so often with Weisband and Lauren Hungate that both women received shout-outs on the album's closing track, "The Girl Who Cried Wolf." In the first verse, Cooke sings, "I told Lauren," before later admitting, "So I told Emily," a nod to the friends who fielded her texts during an incessant on-again, off-again relationship.
The album's final lyric lands like the culmination of everything Cooke has been working toward every other Wednesday in therapy: "There's tears in her eyes / This girl in the mirror / Even she don't believe me / Hell I wouldn't either."
So where do we find the country star as she moves into her next chapter? And what could it mean for songwriters across country music? Just as country music has room for outlaw country and murder ballads, Cooke's sophomore album shows there are as many ways for women to write autobiographical songs as there are tiny pieces of shattered hearts.
At a time when Taylor Swift's songwriting has become the measuring stick for a generation of young women in Nashville, Cooke's writing thrives on unexpected angles, dry humor and clever titles that make familiar heartbreak feel newly specific.
Moreover, in the vein of Swift's "Speak Now" and Kelsea Ballerini's "Rolling Up the Welcome Mat," "ashley cooke" invites listeners into one woman's emotional evolution. The details are uniquely hers, but the impulse is timeless: tell the truth and trust someone else will hear themselves in it.
Cooke still considers herself a hopeless romantic rendered in baby blue imagery.
"I think now I'm a little quicker to see the red flags and go, 'Nope, I'm out,'" she said. "I'm kind of in a love-thy-self era."
Bryan West is a music reporter at The Tennessean, part of the USA TODAY Network. Follow him on Instagram, TikTok and X as @BryanWestTV.
This article originally appeared on Nashville Tennessean: Country music star Ashley Cooke gets personal on new album 'Ash'
