Ashton Shepherd 'Sounds So Good' album

Blink and you might miss tiny Leroy, Alabama, but if your ears are open, you just might hear it. The pure, clear, country voice of Ashton Shepherd lilts through the evening air in Leroy from a place called The Pickin’ Shed. It’s a cabin behind her house situated on seven acres of cropland. After the day’s chores are over, she and her husband and her brother-in-law break out their guitars and fill the Shed with songs.

And what songs they are. Ashton Shepherd writes in a style that is as refreshing and direct as her personality. You won’t hear many “kiss-off” songs with more sass and attitude than “Takin’ Off This Pain.” Her bell-like voice chimes with innocence on the charming rural celebration “Sounds So Good.” She’s a feisty, fun country gal on the loose “I Like Being Single” and “Not Right Now.” “Old Memory That Don’t Remember Me” and “Whiskey Won the Battle” are classic-sounding “weeper” ballads that could have been written a generation ago.

Her moods range from a touching story song like “How Big Are Angel Wings” to a fiery hillbilly rocker like “The Bigger the Heart, the Harder They Fall.” The drenched-in-steel love ballad “Lost in You” contrasts beautifully with her striking, woman-to-woman saga “Regular Joe.” Her beloved “Pickin’ Shed” is the subject of one particularly friendly ditty, and her powerful housewife lyric “I Ain’t Dead Yet” is another page from her autobiography.

All of these potent tunes are on Sounds So Good, the debut Ashton Shepherd album from MCA Nashville. All of them were written before she turned 21.

“This is what I was born to do,” says Ashton in her honey-smooth, deep-Alabama accent. “I’ve always been singing, but it didn’t come from me. I didn’t just teach myself to sing. I’ve always sung. The songwriting is the same. As soon as I was big enough to write on paper, I was coming up with stuff. I’ve got notebooks where I was writing down songs when I couldn’t even spell correctly, from the time I was five, six, seven years old.”

The words come spilling out of her in a chatty rush. Ashton has an open-hearted candor that is instantly endearing. She speaks exactly like the country girl she has always been.

If you look at a map of her home state, you’ll see that there is a vast area southwest of Birmingham where there are no interstate highways and communities so small that Demopolis, population 7,500, is a metropolis by comparison. Here, the Tombigbee and Alabama rivers meander slowly southward toward Mobile through acre after acre of forests and farm fields. Coffeeville, where Ashton was raised, is a tiny town of 360. Leroy doesn’t even list a population.

“There’s a high school and some peanut fields and that’s about it,” she says. “You blink and you miss it. My husband’s family farms produce, so we stay busy with that. When the folks in Nashville asked what I’d been doing lately, I told them, ‘I’ve been picking peas in the morning and picking guitars at night.’ ”

She was born Ashton Delilah Shepherd on August 16, 1986. Her dad, Donnie, worked in a paper mill along the Alabama River. Mom Denise was a housewife and mother to Ashton, her two older brothers and younger sister. Both parents sang, and Denise’s attempts at guitar playing were emulated by both of her sons. But Ashton was even more precocious.

“I started singing as soon as I could talk,” Ashton reports. “I entered my first country showdown when I was eight years old. I sang ‘Crazy’ and ‘Walkin’ After Midnight’ by Patsy Cline. That’s all I ever sang when I first got started. I sang ‘She’s Got You’ and ‘I Fall to Pieces’ and all of hers. I just thought her voice and everything about her was so awesome and unique.”

As a child, she sang classic country tunes at local fairs, benefit shows and community events. When she was 14, her older brothers urged her to take up the guitar.

“A pinch before I turned 15, I started playing. When I picked up the guitar, the songs just started pouring out, just one after the other.”

When she was 15, her parents funded an album recorded at Alabama group member Jeff Cook’s studio in Ft. Payne, Alabama. Her mother took the cover photo.

“We had the minimum of 1,000 copies made of that CD,” Ashton recalls. “I sang so many places where people said, ‘Oh, we’d love to have a CD. Do you have something?’ So we did that so people could have something of mine. We would sell them for $10 or whatever.”

“There were maybe four or five local bars in our area that we played,” says Ashton. “The audiences always loved the original songs. One of their favorites was ‘Not Right Now,’ because the women dig the not-settling-down thing.”

“The local playing was great but I wanted a career. I wanted to put my music out there. But we didn’t know what to do. I used to talk to my husband about it. I would get depressed, because I felt like the good Lord had given me this talent, but I wasn’t doing anything with it. Then one day all of this just happened.”

In June 2006, she entered and won a talent contest in Gilbertown, Alabama. The prize was being the opening act for Lorrie Morgan in concert. A Nashville record producer heard Ashton, asked for a copy of her CD and invited her to come to Nashville to record some of her tunes. She arrived in Music City on August 29, 2006.

Aware that she would need an attorney to deal with the Nashville music business, she telephoned an office she located on the Internet. The woman on the other end of the phone was kind and helpful. She was also connected, since she worked for the legendary producer and guitarist Jerry Kennedy. This led to meeting Jerry’s son Shelby Kennedy, who brought Ashton Shepherd to MCA. Less than a year from the date she arrived in Music City, Sounds So Good was completed with producer Buddy Cannon (Kenny Chesney, Reba McEntire, etc.).

“Everybody has said they’ve never seen anything happen like this,” says the honky-tonk Cinderella. “I can’t wait to meet people and for people to meet me. I hope everybody connects with my music as well as Nashville has. I think they will. I think people will feel the realness in my songs. I’ve always dreamed of this ride I’m about to take. I feel as blessed as I’ve ever felt in my life.”

Track By Track
“Takin’ Off This Pain” (Ashton Shepherd)
“There’s really not much of a story behind this song. I’ve had the opening line, ‘I’ve got a cold beer in my right hand / In my left I’ve got my wedding band.’ After that, the song just came out of nowhere. It was as if I was writing a story or something. I based it on real people, things I’d seen before and stuff that family members had been through. It all came about because of that little opening hook.”

“Regular Joe” (Ashton Shepherd)
“I was in the shower, and I started singing, ‘He ain’t your regular Joe.’ I knew as I was singing that something was coming to me. I knew where I wanted the song to go; in the direction of an ex-girlfriend or ex-wife talking to the other woman. So that set the stage immediately. I wrote a couple of verses. Then I thought how awesome the turn-around would be to have the twist of the other woman realizing, ‘Hey, I better go home.’ So I just finished it that way. Like I say, sometimes they just come out of the air. Or the shower.”

“Sounds So Good” (Ashton Shepherd)
“We were playing music in the Pickin’ Shed, and Adam, my brother-in-law, asked me to get him a beer off the back of the truck. I did. I walked outside. The ice had melted and I heard the cooler sloshing when I reached in and got the beer. I thought, ‘There ain’t nothing like the sound of a cooler slushin’ on the bed of your truck.’ After I said that line, I came up with, ‘There ain’t nothing like the sound of real country music. Come on, turn it up.’ Then I knew that the song should be about real things, about what people around where we live do and about what a lot of people do. Simple country things that real people can relate to.”

“I Ain’t Dead Yet” (Ashton Shepherd)
“To me, ‘Sounds So Good’ and ‘I Ain’t Dead Yet’ are probably the two most this-is-who-Ashton-is songs on the record. With my songwriting, I write from other people’s perspectives and also from mine. This one is definitely from mine. I wrote it with my son right in front of me. I was feeding him to keep him quiet while I wrote the song. Whenever I have the guitar, he wants to be part of me, either hollering and singing along or holding the pick. Anyhow, that’s how the song was written, right there with him.”

“I Like Being Single” (Ashton Shepherd)
“I came up with the title, but then I was kind of stumped. Then I just put myself in the position of remembering what it was like for me. One time my now husband, then boyfriend, and I had problems and had broken up. I felt feisty about it and wanted to say, ‘Hey, you know what? I don’t miss you more than I like being single. I’m going out to have a good time and enjoy myself more than I did with you.’ I came up with the idea and set the stage for the song. I didn’t really have to think too hard about the words, because I knew where I wanted it to go.”

“Lost In You” (Ashton Shepherd)
“I wrote this when I was 15 years old. I was sort of feeling like I liked this boy. And although I’m usually a very talkative person, that whole night I didn’t know what to say. I felt kind of lost. Oddly enough when I met my husband, it also applied because that’s how I felt with him.”

“How Big Are Angel Wings” (Ashton Shepherd / Adam Cunningham)
“This puts a totally different curve on the record. It lets people know that there’s a soft side. My brother-in-law came home from work one day and said, ‘Look, I’ve got this song title.’ At work, they had been drinking Red Bulls. And you know on the commercial for Red Bull it says, ‘It gives you wings.’ That’s how he came up with the title. He said he thought it was so pretty. When he told it to me, I said, ‘Gosh, that is a beautiful title.’ He pretty much had the chorus written, and he knew he wanted the little girl to be taking medicine, looking up at the doctor and asking questions. He’d pretty much come up with 50-60% of the song. He got a phone call, and while he was on the phone, I wrote the second verse and finished it.”

“Not Right Now” (Ashton Shepherd)
“When I was about 17 years old, I was working with my sister-in-law at a finance company. Through the week, I was living with her and my brother and going home on the weekends. One day, I went to her house on a lunch break. I got my guitar, and I was playing it. My husband and I had been dating a couple of years, but had broken up at one point. So I was out on the town, because I had the freedom to. I had a lot of people barking at me about, ‘You don’t need to be doing this and that.’ You know, trying to parent me. So that’s where that idea came from. That’s a realistic song because I lived it. I was feeling like, ‘I don’t have to settle down. Not right now.’”

“Old Memory That Don’t Remember Me” (Ashton Shepherd / Adam Cunningham)
“To me, this is one of those songs that anybody can relate to. Either you or somebody you know has done this. How many people have walked in a bar and seen their ex or somebody they used to care about and have those mixed feelings about it? My brother-in-law gave me the title. I said, ‘Well, obviously it’s going to be about somebody who’s sad about seeing this.’ All I could picture in my mind was somebody seeing somebody they had been with. I sat down to write and just came up with, ‘I got a pocket full of money I shouldn’t spend to drink him away again.’ That feeling is terrible. A lot of it I based on what I felt like when my husband and I had broken up. Because after all, he’s the love of my life. Of course we’re married now, but I remember what it felt like to see him at the little local bar and know that he doesn’t know who I am anymore. So that’s how the song came about.”

“The Pickin’ Shed” (Ashton Shepherd)
“I wrote that about two or three months ago, so it’s a brand-new song. I love the Pickin’ Shed as much as anything in the world. So I told Buddy [Cannon, the record’s producer], ‘I’ve got this song, but I don’t know what you’ll think about it going on the record. I think it would be awesome, because it lets people know what we do, where I’m from and all this stuff.’ So I played it, and Buddy said, ‘It’s awesome.’ I was just tickled to death. I just grinned from ear to ear. I am so proud he liked it, because I didn’t know what the feedback was going to be. It is such a personal song, yet when we recorded it, it became a fun song for everybody. It’s like it’s not personal anymore. It’s just about a place you might have that you go to and feel dear about.”

“Whiskey Won the Battle” (Adam Cunningham)
“That song is 100% my brother-in-law. He sang it to me in the Pickin’ Shed one night. He’s constantly thinking up great catch lines and hooks. After he played it, I just said, ‘I love it.’ It’s just a great country song.”

“The Bigger the Heart, the Harder They Fall” (Ashton Shepherd / Adam Cunningham)
“That song is another one that Adam gave me the title for. We were sitting on the couch together up at his house, and right when he said it, I sang, ‘She’s 5 foot 3, and Lord, ain’t she sweet.’ I wrote it like a book, from start to finish, in about five minutes. It all came together, right there. My brother-in-law went, ‘Holy crap, how did you do that? All I did was give you a title.’ I said, ‘I don’t know.’ You laugh when you hear about people being psychic, but it’s almost like when I hear a song title, I envision it. I meant it to be a peppy song, but I’ll be danged if those Nashville players didn’t burn that one up.”

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Ashton Shepherd - Sounds So Good