Ashton Shepherd Shares ‘I’m Just a Woman’

Ashton Shepherd's new album 'Where Country Grows' may not hit stores until July 12, but the singer-songwriter is giving fans a taste of it now. In honor of Mother's Day yesterday (May 8), Ashton shared the acoustic version of her new tune, 'I'm Just a Woman.' (Watch the video below.)

"I wrote that one by myself," says Ashton, who is the mother of five-year-old James and is expecting her second child in September. "I opened my diary, and I got to an entry where I was writing about feeling bad, empty and sad. After that, I'd written, 'Well, I guess, I'm just a woman.' When I read that, I underlined it."

"The song doesn't bash the man," she says. "It's saying, 'Buddy, I understand you pretty much 99 percent of the time. I need you to understand me, too, sometimes, because I know I can be hard to deal with. I need you to work with me, here, because I feel like I work with you.' It gives women a lot of credit. I think about our mommas, and it makes me get chill bumps, because I feel like I've written an anthem for them."

The new album differentiates itself from the last with such spirited tunes. "This record is more tempo-heavy," Ashton explains. "The first record ['Sounds So Good'] was very country with all the ballads. It made it hard to do live shows, because you had 11 songs and six of them were ballads. Now, we've got a good little handful of spunky songs that I think people will really like to sing along with and enjoy on this record."

Ashton wrote or co-wrote eight of the 10 songs on the record, which Buddy Cannon produced. While she was a bit scared to work with established songwriters such as Dean Dillon, Dale Dodson, Bobby Pinson and Troy Jones, Ashton found herself enjoying the process.

"[The] angle on this record was trying to define Ashton Shepherd in a different way, maybe dig just a little bit deeper and try and put some different kinds of songs on it," she explains. "I was listening back to the record, thinking, 'This has something for everybody on it.' We've accomplished that."