IT’S ALL (SO) GOOD
New Artist Herds Her Sound To Fans

“Hey baby let’s jump in your truck...we’ll ride and watch for lightning bugs”

That’s a line from Ashton Shepherd’s second single, “Sounds So Good”, which is also the title of her debut album. Though the traditionally country 22-year old is a newcomer to the major market, she actually started steeping herself in the mixture of music years before today. And you can certainly hear the years, and beyond them, in her songs. There’s the take-off and pain-free first single “Takin’ off this Pain”, which sings of shearing her ring and other marital stories, but there are also those like “The Harder They Fall” (as in, “the bigger the heart, the harder they fall”), and “Whiskey Won The Battle”. “Battle” was fought and written solely by Shepherd’s brother-in-law and touring bassist, Adam Cunningham. In fact, any writing on the collection she didn’t create came from Cunningham.

“We’re basically like brother and sister,” Shepherd says of him. “He’s easy to write with. I started practicing music with him when I was 15”.

‘The longest I’ve ever spent struggling with a song is probably a week,” she continues. “With ‘I Ain’t Dead Yet’, it kind of came to me like a book, the lines just started pouring out. I had the line ‘I may be getting older but I ain’t dead yet’ and I wrote it in about 15 minutes while my husband was on his way home from work and I had just fed my little boy.”

Launched and productionally propelled by the accomplished Buddy Cannon, she says her favorites on Sounds are “I Ain’t Dead Yet” and “Sounds So Good.” And though it’s not on the album, she often covers the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band’s “Fishin’ in the Dark” in concert.

“I started writing when I was just out of kindergarten,” she shares. “It may not have been the best stuff, though. There is a song called “Johnny” that I liked.”

She won her first talent contest at age 8, and at 15, she still wasn’t sheepish at all; already making music in studio- the studio of Alabama member Jeff Cook, located in Ft. Payne, Alabama, to be exact. Her mom took the cover shot.

“We had the minimum of 1,000 copies made of that CD,” Shepherd says. “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 would have something of mine.”

“It was a nice learning curve,” she adds.

And for those who haven’t “herd” the latest news, there’s more good word in Shepherd’s story- she recently received word from Amazon.com that Sounds So Good picked its way to stay atop the #2 spot on their list of 2008’s Top Ten Country Albums. And she even took #27 on the Top 100 Albums list.

The fortunate one excudes, “I can’t wait to meet people and for people to meet me. I hope everybody connects with my music...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.”

And as if to prove her wild and wooly ride is just getting started, Shepherd continues to be outstanding in her field- having just done a taping of GAC-TV’s Into the Circle series with Patti Loveless and Vince Gill, whose “My Kind of Woman, My Kind of Man” she used at her wedding. Plus she rounded it out on tour with Sugarland (thanks to which, by the way, she had to cut this interview short). Their dates together wrapped up in mid-November.

Now darned if that doesn’t sound oh-so-good.

- Melissa Coker, The Athens BLUR Magazine