This week for the 'Friday Night Takeover,' Lauren Alaina joins Rob + Holly to talk about her new album, 'Stages,' in which she chronicles her journey through Nashville, punctuated by the profound grief of losing her father, and the unbridled joy of having a daughter.

The album features personal tracks dedicated to her family, specifically "Babies Raising Babies," which was written about her brother and his young family, highlighting their shared history of singing in church. “They married young and had my nephew young. And they have 4 babies actually. And I wrote it about them and it's really wild because I wrote it probably 3 or 4 years ago, and then I now have my daughter," she shares.

Alaina also delves into the vulnerability required to write "Heaven Sent," the most difficult track on her record, and a song about the transformative period in her life where she lost her father and became a mother nearly simultaneously. "I mean, the two most impactful things that have ever happened in my life were becoming a mother and losing my dad, and they pretty much happened at the same time."

“I think that was the hardest song to write for the record for sure. I was still pregnant when I wrote it,” Lauren reveals. “I do miss him so much, I don't even know how to explain that loss… So my daily life changed, you know, but I have a little piece of him and it is her.”

“Genetics are so crazy because she looks at me, makes faces. I must make them obviously, but she makes faces and I'm like, ‘oh my God, it looked just like my dad. Like sometimes I'll look at her and I'm like, it blows my mind.”

For more from Lauren Alaina, check out the 'Friday Night Takeover' on your favorite Country station, or listen to the full interview above. 'Stages' is now available everywhere.

The letters are lowercase but the emotion and vulnerability of Ashley Cooke’s self-titled sophomore album is all caps and underlined. The singer recently joined Rob + Holly to unpack the emotional weight of the new project during the 'Friday Night Takeover,' and delved into the inspiration behind her choices.

Ashley reveals that she wrote many of the songs while in the "messy middle" of a real-life relationship and a subsequent breakup. “Literally, I wrote a lot of these songs with and about somebody that I was in a relationship with throughout the whole record. And yeah, there's just a lot of very specific messy details in it,” she reveals.

“Even the last song on the record is called ‘the girl who cried wolf,’ and that song wasn't supposed to be on the record, the record was done, it was done with 14 songs ready to go, and then me and this person broke up again and got back together again and then broke up again, and I was just so fed up with it, and I was so sick of it,” she adds. “A lot of the songs on the record at that point were more like love song sounding stuff, it was more stuff about like missing him, yearning for him, all the things, and so I was like, I have to write the song and just get it out.”

Despite the fear of being "naked in front of a crowd," Ashley emphasizes her decision to lean into vulnerability rather than "water down" her art, hoping that listeners will relate to the raw, real-time experiences she documented.

“All that to say, there's a lot of details on the record for sure,” Cooke says. “But the reason I named it like a self-titled record is because it feels like it also just dives deep into my patterns.”

“If I don't take the risk and just take a deep breath and go, ‘OK, this is gonna be really weird for a season,’ and I'm gonna feel like I'm naked in front of a crowd every single night. If it's gonna feel like that for a minute, and people are gonna know way too much about my life than I would have ever thought so, but there's kind of a path you gotta choose as an artist to go down.”

To hear much more from Ashely Cooke check out the full interview above. ashley cooke is now available everywhere.