Julia Cole is moving on from her “really bad breakup” with Oklahoma City Dodgers pitcher Marshall “Kaz” Kasowski.
“It’s summer, you know, it’s time for some hot girl summer,” Cole, 30, exclusively told Us Weekly on Sunday, June 9, at CMA Fest in Nashville, noting her upcoming single “Spicy” evokes the same feeling.
“It’s so fun because this song ‘Spicy’ is about feeling the confidence to finally, like, get back out there,” she said. “Get your motivation back to believe in yourself [and] put your makeup on with your girls.”
Cole and Kasowski, 29, had known each other since they were children before the MLB star proposed in December 2022. They ultimately split last year.
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“So this past summer, I went through a really bad breakup — and it was a called-off engagement, actually,” Cole told Us. “And so, the Life After You EP has been coming out over the last five months, and every month [is] a next step in the life cycle of this breakup has been coming out. It’s the full arc.”
Cole’s EP is slowly “turning into a full album” since her emotions haven’t ended after the five-song record.
“You’re still healing for, I don’t know how long this is gonna take, for me to be good again,” she explained on Sunday. “After [I’ve released] songs like ‘Diamond Back’ and then ‘Your Boy,’ which is a letter to his mom — I mean, there’s like a whole [part of that] — we need a little moment of, ‘Yeah, let’s drink tequila and be on a boat.’”
Releasing Life After You and “Spicy” have helped Cole move forward, as has performing live. Fresh off her appearance at this weekend’s CMA Fest, Cole is preparing to launch her first headlining tour later this year.
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“I’m so excited to go and meet everybody in person who I’ve been connecting with over the last few years doing some of these opening slots or festival slots and just the social media interaction with the Cole team,” she gushed to Us. “It’s gonna be a tease of my new song ‘Spicy,’ That one hasn’t come out yet, but we’re gonna be playing it at all these shows.”
Cole has been singing since she was a teenager, ultimately moving to Nashville to pursue a career in country music.
“Whenever I was like a senior in high school, I started to do the national anthems for all my volleyball and basketball games and then it spread to everything in Houston,” Cole recalled. “I was singing for the Astros, Texans, NASA, Houston Dynamos, the rodeo, everything locally.”
She continued, “I was already going to Nashville because I wanted to be a writer. I wanted to write books and they have a great creative writing program at [Vanderbilt University]. … Then I started doing this singing thing [and] I was like, ‘Well, maybe I could write songs.’ It’s like a little pivot. I picked up a guitar and I got to this town and the best songwriters in the world live here. I mean, it’s the mecca of songwriting.”
With reporting by Jeremy Parsons
