Ashley Cooke Flashes Her ‘Baby Blues’ as Couples Song Provides Her Latest Single: ‘It Became This Flirty Anthem’
Categoria: Musica
Billboard's Makin' Tracks column looks at the writing and recording behind Ashley Cooke's "Baby Blues."
Por Billboard | 08/07/2026
Hangovers suck. But skipping work over a hangover isn’t cool, either. In fact, putting the nose to the grindstone in the middle of an alcohol-induced headache can actually bring positive results, as Ashley Cooke and four co-writers discovered. They held a four-day songwriting retreat, Jan. 6-9, 2025, at Smith Lake in Northern Alabama as she started building material for what would become the ace album, released Nov. 14 by Big Loud. They were so productive in the first part of the trip that they turned their last night of the retreat into a big celebration. They paid for it on getaway day. “We woke up super hungover,” she remembers. But Cooke and her writing partners – Johnny Clawson (“Weren’t for the Wind,” “Swear Words”), Seth Ennis (“Amen,” “Boys Back Home”), Joe Fox (“It Won’t be Long,” “Last Night Lonely”) and Kyle Sturrock (“Texas,” “Get to Drinkin’”) – had a quota for the trip, and they were one song short. They’d started the retreat by writing a verse and chorus for a song called “Raised Running,” and finishing that was the quickest way to meet their obligation. “We’re all sharing a brain cell and trying to get through this,” Cooke says with a laugh. In addition to picking up on “Raised Running,” part of the conversation hung over from the previous night, too. “Me and Joe had a massive debate the night before with Kyle and Johnny on what was the best John Mayer record,” Ennis recalls. “They were wrong, and I think me and Joe were right, but alcohol definitely had something to do with how loud that debate got, and that carried over into the song the next day.” As they worked through “Raised Running,” Ennis threw out one phrase – “Baby, put those baby blues away” – that turned everybody’s head. They all thought it was too good a line to bury it in a second verse, so they made it the title of a new song. It used the word “baby” two different ways and worked so naturally that a listener wasn’t likely to notice the repetition. And with its minor holster image, it created a slight Western flair. “I think that’s why all of our ears perked up when Seth said that,” Clawson notes. “We were, ‘Oh, that’s clever without being too clever.’ If you can catch someone’s attention without trying too hard, that is usually a pretty good recipe for something that people will come back to.” Fox developed a slinky chord progression on guitar, just enough out of the ordinary to raise an eyebrow. “There’s one out-of-place chord,” he says. “Off the top of my head, I think it’s a two-major, which in a major scale, the chord progression should be two-minor. Adding that two-major kind of makes it feel a little funky, a little different.” The chorus emphasized the song’s dilemma: Does the couple stay or go? It all sounded so good that they made it the opening stanza. That used to happen frequently – think Willie Nelson’s “On the Road Again,” Alan Jackson’s “Don’t Rock the Jukebox” or Florida Georgia Line’s “Cruise” – but occurs m