Kassi Ashton believes that when she was born and her baby feet were pinched to see if her vocal cords worked, a microphone was also held to her mouth and a spotlight shined in her face. “As soon as I was old enough to compute in my tiny brain that I would have a career one day, music was it,” the 30-year-old singer-songwriter tells Rolling Stone. “There was no contemplation.”
In Ashton’s mind, music has always been in her bones and quitting, no matter how many roadblocks were placed in her path, was never an option. “It doesn’t matter to me if it’s going to come easier, it’s going to come hard, or it’s going to be a roller coaster or straight line,” she says. “I’ll do this until I die.”
Last month, Ashton released her major-label debut, Made from the Dirt, a full seven years after signing a record deal. Such a lengthy delay might discourage other artists and cause them to lose faith, but Ashton is used to overcoming the unexpected, often through music.
For the Missouri native’s entire life, her parents have been split. When she was at her mom’s house with her sister, they sang more than they spoke. By 5 years old, she was singing in public — even at the Walmart checkout line. “It was my therapy,” she recalls. “It was what got me through everything.”
Growing up, her passion for performing was also nurtured through ballet and beauty pageants, more proof that her future was going to be spent on the stage. During her senior year studying commercial voice at Nashville’s Belmont University, Ashton experienced what she calls “a business loophole” in her career and participated in a university-wide showcase for members of the music industry. She won, and landed a publishing deal the semester before she graduated in 2016. The following year, she signed a record deal with Universal Music Group Nashville in partnership with Interscope. “Most people have to cut their teeth in bars. Nowadays they have to blow up on TikTok. I think I got kind of lucky,” she laughs.
Despite signing her label deal, the march to Made from the Dirt was glacially slow. At the top of 2018, her label wanted her to go straight to radio and she ended up as a guest feature on Keith Urban’s anthemic single “Drop Top.” Still, Ashton was hesitant — she didn’t want to tour the country playing 30 minutes worth of cover songs. Instead, she wanted to drop five original songs throughout the year before going to radio. Unfortunately, timing wasn’t on her side and only two songs were released.
In 2019, the same strategy was implemented — five songs, five music videos. This time, Ashton landed an opening slot for Maren Morris — her “first tour ever” — and was primed for radio. But the Covid-19 pandemic stunted her momentum and canceled her straight-to-radio tour. For nearly two years, Ashton sat in her house, redid her kitchen, and rode her motorcycle. “I had to start all the way over,” she recalls. “You don’t want to waste your debut when you’re not ready or enough people aren’t listening, or enough people don’t understand your kind of space within the musical landscape.”
While she dropped the non-album single “Dates in Pickup Trucks” in 2022 and the first single from Made from the Dirt, “Drive You Out of My Mind,” in 2023, it was writing the song “Called Crazy,” her first Top 40 hit on the Billboard Country Airplay chart, that felt like a “stepping stone” back toward her career. It reminded Ashton that she was on the right track and, one day while watching a live feed of a couture fashion show, she came up with the title of her debut.
“The models were wearing these gorgeous, metallic, extraordinary gowns, but the stage that they were presenting it on was pitch black, muddy motocross arena, and these models had to physically trudge through this,” Ashton recalls. She instantly related to the dichotomy. “My entire life and my upbringing has been a juxtaposition, so I just thought it was so gorgeous… All of my favorite things about myself that I hold of value — skills, talents, ways of looking at the world — have come from struggle and have been born because I had to figure out ways to be efficient and innovative, to overcome hurdles that I was facing. I’m made from the dirt.”
When it came to shaping the sound of the record, Ashton made a playlist for herself featuring artists she would want to make music for — the ones who “hit me in my gut.” That included Chris Stapleton, Kacey Musgraves, the Rolling Stones, Gary Clark Jr., Aretha Franklin, and Stevie Nicks. It was Ashton’s way of removing all of the trends and outside opinions and digging into who she is. She wanted people to listen to the record and go, “I think I could be friends with that girl because she’s really given a full scope of herself in the most grunge, dirty swamp, countrified way,” she says.
To help her craft her vision, she collaborated with Lori McKenna and Rhett Akins, as well as co-writer and co-producer Luke Laird. Ashton can’t help but praise McKenna, known for songs like Little Big Town’s “Girl Crush” and Tim McGraw’s “Humble and Kind,” in particular. “She’s like a fairy godmother, just bestowing joy and bouts of wisdom,” she says. “Everything that comes out of her mouth is beautiful, like, real and raw, everything that I chase — not a Nashville poetic thing.”
It helped that Ashton didn’t have a theme in mind for the album. Rather, she sat down and wrote real stories about her life in the most vulnerable way possible. What surfaced was an overarching message of “empowerment.” On the album’s sultry title track, she leans into the notion that overcoming hardship can make you “more beautiful and more interesting of a person.” With the defiant grit of “Called Crazy,” Ashton reinforces the notion of “female empowerment,” while “‘Til the Lights Go Out,” which evokes Fleetwood Mac, showcases her innate perseverance to continue chasing her dreams.
On “The Straw,” a dramatic breakup number she penned seven years ago — right around the time she signed her record deal — Ashton reminisces about finding the confidence to leave a relationship that wasn’t serving her. “I would’ve traded all the things you gave me, I didn’t need /I thought I was a stayer, but God, you made a runner out of me,” she sings over steel pedal. “The thread that weaves all the songs together of this real human experience is something that’s so valuable and so gorgeous,” she explains. “Like, you’re gonna make it through. You are a bad bitch.”
Ashton is wholeheartedly embracing that sentiment as Made from the Dirt finds its lane. In the end, reaching an audience is just one more challenge to tackle. She’s been there before. “If I only got one shot, this is good for me, you know?” she says. “I sleep well.”
Daniel D`Amico for SANREMO.FM
