Ashley Cooke Wants It All, Including a Good Man

Ashley Cooke’s “baby blues” music video made my ovaries explode. I tell her this when we first meet on Zoom. The teasers featuring comedian Matt Rife have garnered more than 6 million views on Instagram alone, so I’m willing to bet what’s left of my ovaries are in good company. “baby blues” is a breezy earworm about a man irresistibly hot enough to unmake the bed and make you forget your dinner reservations. In the video, Rife gives Cooke a look across the pool that I tell her altered my brain chemistry. She laughs. She knows the one. By the time he gets his hands on her thighs and lifts her onto a counter, you’re practically salivating, if not yelling at the screen for more. Funny enough, they made out on the first take. “Just do it, just rip the Band-Aid. And so we just made out in front of the camera,” Cooke tells me. Making out with Matt Rife, as one does on any given weekday. “Just do it, just rip the Band-Aid. And so we just made out in front of the camera.” I tell her I was surprised a man directed a video that distinctly gave the female gaze such a good name. It’s the stuff of 2000s rom-coms, practically an extinct species today. The twist? The woman getting lifted onto the counter was the architect. Cooke tells me what director Josh Erb said after that first take. They had plenty of make-out footage. Now he wanted to get the tease, flirtation, and slow-burn tension she’d envisioned. “Matt, put her up on the counter and go really close to kissing her, but not quite yet,” she recalls him saying. Cooke wanted to build “this kind of will-they, won’t-they moment.” In an era when everyone’s in a hurry to take their clothes off, the inch between their lips nearly sent me to confession. I call it: the Ashley Gaze. Cooke loves romance novels and “men written by women,” and she knew exactly how she wanted this to go down. She’d already serenaded Rife at CMA Fest , where they hit it off and became friends with what she describes as a “kind of magnetic, just electric” chemistry. When she cast the video, she asked herself, “Who would be somebody that people would be so excited to see me with, but also somebody that I would feel comfortable with?” Cooke had been making music since she was a kid and was ready to show a side of herself her audience rarely got to see. “I want to own this shit,” she says confidently. “I want to own the fact that I’m a fun, flirty girl and let’s just have a good time.” It was her first kiss in a music video, and far from a peck at that. “We got hot and heavy.” Making out on command wasn’t awkward? I had to ask. “No, no, it was super, super comfortable, super fun, super easy. We just had the absolute best time and it really just came super naturally,” she says. “I just adore him.” She trusted Rife enough to play. And it shows. Ashley Cooke makes wanting a man look hot again . You can feel how much fun she’s having. Rife gets to be sexy. Cooke gets to want him, to feel desired right back, and to decide exactly how we see it. The romance-novel treatment reminds us how much fun it is when a man and a woman are just really into each other. In a world that’s complicated everything around gender, it doesn’t get realer than that. She got some flak for it on tour. During “baby blues,” Cooke picks someone out of the crowd (sometimes women) and serenades them. Some commenters decided she was looking for attention . And when it came time to post a video of herself making out with Matt Rife, she responded to the mound of uncertainties by throwing caution to the wind. “This is a lot, but also who cares?” Owning her sexual presence in this way is clearly something she’s thought about at length. Cooke describes the women she finds singularly magnetic. “The most feminine people that I just really admire have this undeniable draw to them that you’re like, ‘Wow, that’s a woman.’” I nearly high-five my laptop. “She owns what she is and who she is, and she doesn’t feel like she has to appease anybody in the room, but also isn’t unkind,” Cooke says. She’s telling me this from home, in a fleece zip-up, her hair in a messy low ponytail, looking naturally beautiful like she wandered out of an old-school Abercrombie ad. That effortless confidence she’s talking about permeates through the screen. I’ve spent enough time covering Hollywood to know how easily bashing men can become a bonding ritual. In modern showbiz, it’s practically a rite of passage. I make a comment about the mainstream male-bash art, and we agree about how palpable this has become in our generation’s real-life gender dynamics. Don’t get me wrong, she’s had plenty of material to buy into that orthodoxy and has written songs about men who hurt her. Cooke and her ex worked on her latest self-titled album together while they were still a couple. Yet she still thinks men are worth writing love songs about. “I don’t think any of the people that I dated or wrote about or experienced things from are bad people,” she tells me. “I just think that they did some shitty things to me and that was my experience, so I’m going to write about it and voice about it.” She’s just as happy to talk about the men she’s loved dating and having in her orbit. “When you have people like Matt and just other amazing men around you, I feel like it’s easy to celebrate and be flirty and have those moments because you have those wonderful men that you want to celebrate,” she says. The 29-year-old is refreshingly against the grain of modern feminism. “The narrative of ‘screw all men’ is something that I don’t really feel or align with.” Cooke knows a thing or two about the magnetism she admires in others. That, or she’s a manifesting wizard. Last year, she released the duet “All I Forgot” with Joe Jonas. I bring up how, the first time she met Joe, she blurted out that she’d historically been a Nick girl. She laughs and covers her face with her hands. She flew to Toronto in a snowstorm to shoot content for the song between takes of the Jonas Brothers’ Christmas movie . She walked into a room with Joe, Nick, and Kevin and was struck by how ordinary it felt. “They’re just so down to earth and cool,” she says. “They’re just so normal.” Cooke’s met plenty of famous people who act like fame gives them permission to be jerks. “They have such a massive platform and they’re just so kind,” she says. The experience left an inspiring impression on her. “No matter how big this thing gets, you always want to be kind and present and attentive and just yourself and down to earth to everybody around you.” She’s right. I’ve met countless D-list influencers on the red carpet who acted like they were doing me a bigger favor than Meryl Streep. Never mind some of the actual A-listers who blew right over me like I was a speed bump. Cooke intimately knows the world they came up in. As a kid in L.A., she ran in the same circles as Disney kids , spent time on the Hannah Montana set, and grew up with the Cyrus family . She was closest to Noah, and the two even sang Jordin Sparks and Chris Brown’s “No Air” at a school graduation. “We’ve talked a few times about maybe doing something together,” Cooke says. “Let’s run it back. Let’s do another one.” Though another “No Air” rendition is not confirmed at this time. It must be surreal. I bring up how child stars seem to either thrive or notoriously become a punchline for spiraling down a dark path. She saw it firsthand: friends who flourished, some who struggled with addiction or mental health, and others who are gone. “I just really don’t know where I would’ve fit into that equation.” If she’s being honest, she and her sister, who sang together as a duo , still wonder what would’ve happened if they were in L.A. a little longer. Maybe even just for one more audition. “Who knows, maybe we would’ve been on the Miley or the Demi trajectory in a different way,” she reflects, admitting she feels a little FOMO thinking about it. “You never know who I would’ve been if I would’ve stayed there.” There are many what-ifs, but it seems her North Star brings peace of mind. “I’m a huge believer in God, and I think that there’s a reason why I was pulled out of that young,” she says. “There has to be a good reason for it.” Now, the little girl who used to hang around the Hannah Montana set is about to headline the Ryman . Cooke’s already had her first country radio No. 1 with “your place” and toured with Luke Bryan and Kane Brown . Things are good. But like most of us, she’s perpetually evaluating. Which brings me to a song on her new album, “when we’re 30.” “Hey, not right now, but when we’re 30, you’re the best guy I know. Let’s do it,” she says, summing up the song. Thirty sounds comfortably far off when you sing it like that. For Cooke, it’s about eight months away. So is life at nearly 30 what she expected? Is it ever? "I’m a huge believer in God, and I think that there’s a reason why I was pulled out of that young." “I’m so happy with my career right now, and there’s so many goals that I have,” she says. “I live alone with my dog and I love it. It’s the best ever.” She reads, journals, and enjoys the peace of coming home. Yet all of her success isn’t a perfect antidote to modern female existentialism. She wants children someday and also knows she wants more time for the career she’s spent years building. “I don’t think I’m ready for that yet, and I just have things that I want to do before I dive so deep into motherhood.” What really gets her is that pesky ticking clock, and watching her parents get older, go gray, and move a little slower. Suddenly I feel like we share a diary. “It does weigh on me that I feel like I’m running out of time with my parents on the back end of it, and it’s getting further and further away from them really getting to know my kids, but that’s something we all have to live with.” I tell her that at 35, I get it. If we were in the same room, this is when I’d pour us a shot of whiskey. “You just never really know how long they’re going to be around.” On her Christmas EP, Wrapped , she sings “Silent Night” with her family members. For now, the Cookes’ Christmas card comes with harmonies. As for a potential partner? Whoever he is, he’d better be able to go toe-to-toe with the woman behind “Tinfoil Hat.” “If I see a conspiracy theory online, I typically tend to hop on board and go deep dive down the rabbit hole.” As we get into the Antarctica ice wall theory and the moon landing, I start to think my publicist friend on the call thinks we’re both nuts. “Why haven’t we gone back?” Cooke asks. “Do I think that we’ve gone to the moon? Yes. Do I think we went when we said we went? No. That’s my hot take.” Her ideal man is somewhere a little closer to home. We’re used to hearing that behind every strong man is a strong woman. Cooke makes a pretty good case for the reverse. She knows, and has shown, what she can do on her own. She’s just as sure about who she’d want beside her for the journey—far from a performative male presence, like the Barbie movie’s Ken doll. A true counterpart. That’s how secure she is in her values, power, and femininity. “It’s so attractive when a man has their own career, their own love, their own passions that they’re able to do, because then we can come home for the day and talk about our passions together and talk about how amazing it was to do X, Y, Z,” she explains. “This may sound so cliche, but allows me to just be me.” It’s not lost on me that half the feminists out there would be pissed I’m even asking a woman of this caliber about a future man as part of a profile. But Ashley Cooke totally gets it. “Sometimes being the masculine presence is allowing your woman, allowing the feminine presence to really take the lead and just supporting her in that.” She embraces the idea of a man with a backbone, who’s secure enough to hold his own yet follow her. You can see a version of that dynamic in the making of, and in, the “baby blues” video. He gets to take the lead because she knows what she wants from it. It’s what frees her power, both on and off screen. “Sometimes being the masculine presence is allowing your woman, allowing the feminine presence to really take the lead and just supporting her in that,” Cooke says. “But also having the capability and being willing to step up when she needs you to… It’s different ways to yin and yang, like you were saying.” I tell her that with her confidence and trajectory, she’s going to need this kind of equal. Someone who, like her, knows exactly who they are and where they’re going. The Ashley Gaze initially made me root for a kiss. By the time we hang up, I’m rooting for the kind of life she and so many of us hope to build.