It's a girl for Shepherd

This is America

Ashton Shepherd's traditional approach to country music garnered her three top 25 songs from her two MCA albums, but now she's out on her own. She is not the singer that Music City would not know what to do with. Shepherd hasn't changed all that much as she hews to a traditional country bent with her twangy, Southern drawl singing and instrumentation. Shepherd has no one but herself to "blame" as she wrote nine of the 10 songs (one assumes that she also penned the ...

Where Country Grows

A voice as robust and nuanced as Ashton Shepherd's brings to mind the old she could sing the phone book joke - only in this case, it would have to be a listing for a small town down a country road, with entries for Southern staples such as Jones' General Store and Billy Bob's Honky Tonk. Those rural places and faces are exactly what Shepherd's new album "Where Country Grows" is built around, its songs every bit as down to earth as its title suggests. ...

Look It Up

Ashton Shepherd showed a lot of promise on her debut, "Sounds So Good" and the single Takin' Off This Pain from 2008, but somehow nothing quite took off from the CD, and her career seemed stalled. This four-song EP revives it and a teaser of what's to come from a full-length slated for later this year. Shepherd sounds a bit too mannered, overemphasizing words as if she's trying a tad too hard (the kiss-off single Look It Up). She's a fine singer, as she was on her ...