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.”

(CSC) 1. You just released your debut album, “Sounds So Good” this past year. Being a new artist, what was it like for you being able to contribute your own selection of songs to it and have that much freedom musically?

(Ashton Sheperd)

It meant the world to me to be able to put that many of my songs on my first album and to get to contribute so much, it meant a great deal. The music industry was letting me in a place that I never thought I would ever be. I thought even if they liked my voice and singing, I didn’t know how much they would agree with my songwriting ability and the fact that I do most of it alone. Most of the time with publishing companies, most people write and co-write together, and I didn’t really do a lot of that, so I didn’t think they would accept it, but they did.  

(CSC) 2. You grew up in the small town of Coffeeville, Alabama. What was daily life like for you before pursuing a career in country music?

(Ashton Sheperd)

About three or four years ago, I was actually living with my mom and dad, and working at a little gas station. My boyfriend at the time’s family farmed produce, and I sold collard greens while I worked at the gas station. Not long after that me and my boyfriend got married, and we had a little boy. I was a stay at home mom for two years with my little boy, and we farmed produce on the side and my husband worked construction work. Within a year and a half all of this has happened for us, and it’s been a total life change.

(CSC) 3. In your early teens, you played all over local fairs, festivals, and bars captivating listeners alike. Looking back now, what’s one important thing that you learned from playing to those intimate audiences? (How does it apply to the audiences you perform to now?)

(Ashton Sheperd)

I’ve learned that people are just people, and to be very normal with people. Always be yourself and relate to them somehow, because everyone wants to feel like that they can like be the performer in someway and be in tune to who you are and what you do, and just be relatable to people is what I’ve learned the most.

(CSC) 4. Your musical style is obviously more on the traditional side compared to some of the pop-flavored country that’s heard on the radio today. What country music artists influenced you growing up?

(Ashton Sheperd)

I always say Keith Whitley and John Conlee are two people that my big brothers always listened to, and they mostly listened to traditional country music from George Jones, Dolly Parton, and Conway Twitty. I was born in 1986, and I listened to Alan Jackson, Patty Loveless and Randy Travis, and in that era of music that was still real traditional country music.

(CSC) 5. Since landing a record deal your life has had a complete 360 in a short amount of time. What do you enjoy about life on the road? Are there any challenging issues that you’ve faced while on tour so far?

(Ashton Sheperd)

The hardest thing for me about being on tour is the switching on and off; being a mom, being a wife and being a performer all at the same time. I have to be a lot of things and play a lot of roles, and I try to be really good at all of them, and it can get really difficult. I always pray about it, and try to be myself through all of it and remember that when I’m home, I’m home, and turn the phone off and enjoy being there. When I’m on the road, I try to focus on the road, and not missing home, and you just have to know how to balance it, and that’s the hardest part. 

(CSC) 6. Some of your fellow peers in the business such as country superstars Keith Urban, Miranda Lambert, and Sugarland have praised you for your traditional sound and honest lyrics. What does that mean to you coming from these seasoned artists?

(Keith Urban; “I heard “Sounds So Good” and went out and bought the album. I must have played this song eight times or more, and I knew I was listening to a piece of classic, country perfection!”)

(Ashton Sheperd)

It means so much to me I can’t even explain it. I grew up listening to country music all my life and I listened to Keith Urban and Miranda Lambert on radio long before I had even entered Nashville. To get to hear artists that are successful and have already made careers for themselves that are so humongous means a whole lot when they like to hear my music. It makes me feel a lot more confident about what I’m doing.

(CSC) 7. Speaking of Sugarland, you are joining them this fall to embark on their nationwide tour. What are you most looking forward to about that, and what can fans expect to hear from you in concert? (Any covers that you like to perform?)

(Ashton Sheperd)

I’m going to be performing songs off of my album and we have a brand new single on radio called “Sounds So Good,” my first was single was “Taking Off This Pain,” and we’ll be performing those every night so we can spread them around to everyone. I’m looking forward to being in front of such a large audience every night. To be in the midst of Jennifer Nettles and Christian Bush its great, they are two very special people. They are very real and down to earth, so I’m looking forward to the whole thing.

(CSC) 8. If you had the chance to go back in time into the era of 70’s country, which “legendary” female artist would you most likely be, and why?

(Ashton Sheperd)

Highway 101 is someone I would have loved to be in their shoes for a little while. I remember songs like “Whiskey, If You Were A Woman,” which is something that I used to cover. They were a very cool band and they had awesome music.

(CSC) 9. What motivates you in life?

(Ashton Sheperd)

Being a mother is number one. It’s something I’ve always wanted to do and still want to do. I want to have three or four more children if I can, and I’ve always been excited being a mother and now I am one, and it’s the greatest thing in the world. Secondly is having my career and be able to do it at the same time. It keeps me motivated and keeps me going all the time. 

(CSC) 10. What do you have in store for the rest of 2008 and into early 2009?

(Ashton Sheperd)

Going on tour with Sugarland, which is such a great opportunity. I’ll be touring all over the place this fall and the rest of the summer, and hopefully into the ladder of the year we’ll be having our third single out. We now have the second single out, and a brand new video out, and we’re hoping to have our single in the top 10, I’m crossing my fingers, and we have a lot of  things going on. I’m really hoping that this year is great enough for me to plan around next year, because I haven’t really went that far yet. I want to see where I am at the end of this year before I start making any really big plans.