Kassi Ashton Says First Country Album Isn’t an ‘Era I’m Going Through’: ‘Don’t Want the Debut to Be a Trend’ (Exclusive)

Kassi Ashton is as self-assured as she is unapologetic, and her debut album Made from the Dirt is no exception.

The country singer, 30, aptly hails from a place called California, Missouri, where her equal parts free spirit and self-proclaimed “hillbilly” heritage have combined to shape her into a spitfire artist, all in perfect time.

“The music that I have made now and that’s on this album and that I’m making for after the album, I couldn’t have made that five years ago. I just wasn’t as concentrated and honed in on who I am as a person. It wasn’t like I discovered myself, that’s not it, it’s more so I uncovered myself,” the 2024 ACM nominee tells PEOPLE exclusively.

Ashton says she had a “come to Jesus moment” during the pandemic when she really stopped to ask herself what kind of music she enjoyed most, and she found her answer in the notion that she wanted to create things she would be proud to “play for my favorite artists in the genre,” like Chris Stapleton and Brothers Osborne and Sturgill Simpson.

“Why am I not doing that?” she remembers asking herself.

Ashton’s vibe is very much Stevie Nicks meets Eric Church — two more of her great inspirations — and the result is a sound she calls “everything that had soul and grit and a story and a lot of guitars in the production.”

“Everything in my gut was screaming, ‘This is it. This music is so good,'” she says of crafting her album. “And I don’t think that I’m going to be tired of it in 10 years. I don’t think that this is an era that I’m going through. You definitely don’t want the debut to be a trend because it’s going to be everyone’s first impression. This has really got to be you. And then if you want to zigzag on your way after that, totally cool.”

Ashton may not be sonically zigzagging, but her path to rising country star wasn’t quite linear, either.

She was raised by parents who had split by the time she was born, and she spent most of her upbringing shuffling between each of their homes before later enrolling at Belmont University in Nashville.

“My mom is as southern as they come. I remember my pawpaw, even if he was wearing his teeth, you couldn’t understand what he was saying. And then my dad’s whole side of the family are just hillbillies, long-bearded, motorcycle, gun-owning hillbillies — not southern, not redneck. Hillbillies,” she says earnestly. “And so my mom sang country and my sister sang country, and that was the main genre that was played in our house. It was never a question of what I wanted to do.”

One of the songs off Ashton’s new album in particular is titled “Son of a Gun,” and it essentially serves as her own origin story.

“My mom was a UPS driver and my dad was delivering meat at a bar and they were hitting on each other. My mom was like, ‘Oh, I know where you live. You’re that [one] with the gate, a million miles from his house, and I can’t get the packages up.’ Not a fancy gate, like a cattle gate. And my dad was like, ‘You don’t know where I live.’ So my mom raced him and my dad took the long way around, and my mom was waiting at the gate when he got there,” Ashton says of how her parents first met.

“[They] were only together for three years, so the inspiration of that song was even if two things weren’t meant to be together, I’m a product of that anyway, so we’ll see,” she surmises, before quoting a lyric from the tune.

“Bad seeds get sown, black sheep they roam. by fortune or mistake, tell me baby, do you like the way it tastes?”

All this is to say, Ashton, a thyroid cancer survivor who rides a Harley Davidson named Lilith and has toured with the likes of Maren Morris, is the real deal, and she hopes Made from the Dirt conveys her authenticity.

“I’m a real person and I’m down to earth and I’ve had my struggles and I can sing my ass off!” she says with a laugh. “I hope they get that at the end, and I hope that they kind of fantasize about riding a motorcycle when they get done.”

Made from the Dirt is out everywhere now.