Whenever grandma calls,Kassi Ashtonpicks up the phone.
A five-foot-two spitfire that grew up in a tiny two-bedroom farmhouse, the rising country star’s grandmother often keeps her cell phone in a drawer, rarely charged and rarely used. So, when she does call, Ashton knows grandma means business.
But this call was different.
“She says to me, ‘Me and your grandpa went on a date last night,'” Ashton, 28, recalls in an interview with PEOPLE about the conversation she had with her grandmother a few years back. “She told me how they drove around old roads that they hadn’t seen in a really long time. And then they ate dinner on the back of their pickup truck.”
Kassi Ashton.Alexa King
Certainly, it sounded like quite a date night for a woman in her late 80s. But to Ashton, it was also a story of sweet times and carefree moments, and a story that the talented singer/songwriter wanted to turn into a song. And she did just that, courtesy of her country radio debut single “Dates in Pickup Trucks.”
“I knew that if I had an idea called ‘Dates and Pickup Trucks,’ it would need to rub against something thatdidn’tsound like that,” Ashton says of the song she ultimately penned in early 2019 alongside David Garcia and Luke Laird. “I knew that the song title alone could come across super cliché and I didn’t want it to get shot down before it even got a chance.”
Once the talented trio gathered in the writing room, Garcia began to play a fresh-sounding drum beat and Laird made an offhanded mention of Sonic cups hiding beers, and the song began to take off with lyrics that harken back to a day when one didn’t have to look too far down the road to find a good time.
“If I could replace half the lyrics that are in my head with real information, I would be so intelligent,” laughs Ashton, who released her dynamic song, “Heavyweight” late last year.
The lyrics of “Dates in Pickup Trucks” also allowed Ashton herself to take a trip down memory lane to the days she spent in her hometown of California, Missouri.
“You either went to Pizza Hut or you drove around and listened to music,” Ashton remembers. “There was a loop in my hometown that went from the shopping center to city hall. And everyone drove around that loop endlessly and then you would meet up in the shopping center parking lot and play music and sit on the front of the truck.”
Today, it’s the joy held within “Dates in Pickup Trucks” that Ashton finds herself falling into, especially as she heals from what ended up being quite a tumultuous couple of years for the road warrior.
“There was a point in my life when I was unhealthy and not in therapy, and I used to think that my career was all I would ever need,” she says quietly. “But now, after quarantine and all this stuff we have all gone through, I realize that if I didn’t have the people I love, none of this would be worth it. It just would not be worth it if I had to come home to myself and I didn’t have my best friends and my family and Travis.”
The ‘Travis’ she refers to is Travis Myatt, a Nashville publishing exec and Ashton’s boyfriend of five years.
“He’s the most supportive, most open-minded person I know,” she raves. “I’ve been so in love with him our whole relationship. He understands that I sometimes have to wait for this next move in life until my career catches up. He doesn’t ever push me to think differently. Plus, my grandma loves him.”
source: people.com
