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By any measure, this is a triumphant week for Ashley McBryde. Amid the crush of publicity for The Devil I Know, the Girl Goin’ Nowhere artist hits more career milestones and aims straight for the heart with her unflinching personal truth. Even with all of the heady praise from Variety via MSN and Yahoo per UPI for her new effort, Ashley McBryde still knows how to have fun, as Taste of Country notes. Sometimes, though, a marathon session of Golden Girls gets in the way of important news– and big nominations. Read on to learn more about her new album and her momentous week.
The truth, like only Ashley McBryde knows it and tells it
Not surprisingly to her faithful fans, Ashley McBryde takes a different tack from the usual fanfare that accompanies a major country music artist’s latest release. While most herald their “artistic growth,” the songwriting craft, or a major new direction under a different producer, Ashley spills straight from the heart and soul, from her very first words.
“I used to drink too much,” McBryde opens her social media announcement. Self-effacingly, the Martha Divine singer confesses that most of the places “where I used to show my ass don’t exist anymore.”
She continues with words applicable to the entire music industry and modern culture. “Nearly everyone you talk to is tryin’ to sell you a bill of goods…or just straight up lying to ya,” Ashley McBryde insists, before taking an emotionally divergent revelation with “I once fell in love with a really good friend of mine.”
Further elaborating, Ashley McBryde seems to relish her awareness of “how damn complicated we all are” and how our evolving selves “ain’t even worried about any of the other us’s we’ve been.” Proudly, the girl once publicly shamed by her teacher declares with greater surety than Deepak Chopra how “I’m not only at peace with these facts, I’m celebrating the sh*t out of them… and learning to live in the rhythm.”
“Here’s The Devil I Know,” Ashley McBryde concludes, closing with “Love, Ash”
A stand-out homage
Only a day out from its official release, Ashley McBryde fans undoubtedly have their favorites among the album’s 11 tracks. The title track already stands at 370K views on YouTube after five months, while the tender, heart-rending Light On In The Kitchen, starring McBryde and her real-life mom, as Country Music Alley detailed in late July, captures ageless cross-generational comforts and truth as few ballads have in the millennial era.
Bluntly, Ashley McBryde ponders aloud “I don’t know when we decided to let people write songs about things that they don’t do.” “I don’t know when we stopped demanding that of ourselves,” she questions. Decisively, McBryde put herself in a completely different category.
“I don’t sing anything that’s not true,” she declares. “And if I talk about having hoed a road, it’s because I have hoed a road.”
Through lyric after lyric, painful and jubilant emotion pours through this latest collection. One critic dubs Learned To Lie a “heart destroyer,” but for Ashley McBryde, the album’s final track, 6th of October, represents a true grieving process, as a Taste of Country feature describes.
The ballad reminds us “not to be afraid of our scars/And who we are” as a tribute to Randall Clay, who collaborated on Tired Of Being Happy and El Dorado with Ashley McBryde. Unabashedly, Ashley calls Clay “the finest songwriter I’ve never written with,” and the seed of the song started with another writing partner, CJ Field. In fact, the first lines of the moving and brutally honest are rooted in a true-life exchange between Field and Clay, following Field’s drive from Massachusetts.
A date of hurt and happiness
Paradoxically, the fateful date of the title also became the date that Ashley McBryde and other friends of Randall Clay learned “that it wasn’t looking good for our friend still be living,” and simultaneously, the date Garth Brooks invited McBryde to become a member of the Grand Ole Opry on CBS Mornings.
‘Golden Girls’ almost preempts golden news
Fittingly, Ashley McBryde begins her tour in support of The Devil I Know on October 6 in Atlanta and wraps in Dublin, Ireland on January 28, 2024. The hard work of launching a tour, promoting a new album, and literally, meeting the press on multiple fronts meant Ashley and her crew were ready for some glam time.
The sessions ensued at 6 AM at Ashley McBryde’s house on September 7, an hour before the CMA Award nominations came out. The girl gang gathered in the kitchen to binge on Golden Girls while getting their beauty treatments, “like you do,” as the singer-songwriter insisted.
When the wardrobe manager, Blakely Collier, reminded everyone that CMA nominations came in, Ashley McBryde admits her response was, “like, ‘Really?’” Of course, a run to her phone revealed many text messages of congratulations. It has to be kismet that Light On In The Kitchen is up for Music Video of the Year. Ashley McBryde Presents Lindeville also earns nods for Album of the Year and Female Vocalist of the Year.
For Ashley McBryde, staying true to the truth is the perfect path.
Stay tuned into Country Music Alley for the latest updates on Ashley McBryde and all your favorite country music stars.
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