Kassi Ashton is a creative. While she’s most famously known for her music career with soul-searing songs like “California, Missouri” and “Violins,” the Midwestern beauty is more than just a pretty voice.
Matthew Simmons
Ashton has been designing her own clothes, dancing, and expressing herself through art since she was a little girl growing up in small-town Missouri. (For her recent “Violins” video, Ashton not only designed and made her own wardrobe, she choreographed the dance routines.)
And now, as her music career is really taking off (she’ll hit the road on Maren Morris’s “GIRL: The World Tour” later this summer), she’s showing the world all that she can do. Now the Belmont grad is dishing on what it’s like to make your own way in country music—and how to be an individual in all facets of life. kassiashton.com
Growing Up Different:
Ashton grew up living a double life that shaped who she is today.
“I’m a love child—mom lived in town, dad lived out of town. Mom’s was classical ballet six days a week—seven during Nutcracker season—beauty pageants; art; my mom is who taught me how to sew.” Life on her father’s farm was very different. “I was shooting muzzleloaders with my grandpa, riding dirt bikes, playing in the mud, and hunting. So that made me a very polarizing human being because my whole life I wanted to be just as much one as I was the other. And that is hard in a small town because everyone wants you to be one thing.”
GIRL Power
Ashton will join the fall leg of Maren Morris’s wildly popular GIRL: The World Tour, including its October 18 date at Ascend. The tour will be Ashton’s first, and she received the news at an unexpected time.
“I’m in a parking lot at Home Depot loading 40 bags of top soil into the back of my Jeep, and I was jumping around the parking lot, freaking out. Our New York show is at Radio City Music Hall and I just can’t even fathom that this is my first tour ever and it’s this.”
Ashton is especially excited to play for Morris’s fans, with whom she feels a kinship.
“For artists like me, it can be difficult to feel like you can be your full self. Sometimes you’re opening for someone you think, ‘Do I need to cater more toward their audience?’ But with Maren I know that I can go and do my show 7,000 percent whatever I want it to be and wear what I want to wear—I’m designing all the outfits—and not have to worry about is it too country, is it too pop…I can just be me.”