In 2022, Ashley McBryde had built a career many would envy. She’d earned awards acknowledgement from both the Country Music Association and Academy of Country Music; had two albums reach the top 10 on Billboard’s Top Country Albums chart; and had breakthrough songs such as “Girl Goin’ Nowhere” and “One Night Standards.”
But she had also spent years battling an alcohol dependency, both on and offstage. A pivotal intervention from some of McBryde’s friends and team members led the Grammy winner to check in to a treatment center that year to seek help.
“I had been trying [to stop drinking] for a couple of years on and off, and I think if the intervention hadn’t happened, I would’ve had a harder time making it stick,” McBryde says today. “I had a performance and I hadn’t drank in about a month. A friend wound up convincing me that it would be okay [to have a drink]. I woke up in not my pajamas, not my bed, not my house. I thought I had it licked, like ‘I don’t have to work a program. I don’t have to go to meetings. I can do this, I’m strong enough by myself’ — and that’s when I found out I was not strong enough by myself.
“I got up to get a drink of water and there was my team in [this person’s] living room,” McBryde continues. “I couldn’t find my boots. My glam team, my wardrobe team, went and bought clothes that I would have to wear during treatment. They were like, ‘No, f–k it. You don’t get to go home. Hand me your phone, you’re turning it in, and go.’ And then for somebody like Dayna [Slaughenhoupt, McBryde’s hair and makeup stylist], who’s been with me for eight years, to look at me and say, ‘You’re just so sad and I’m tired of watching you hurt…’ my response was ‘yes,’ because I’d proven for the one millionth time that I couldn’t do it by myself. That made it easier when I got to treatment, to go, ‘I’m going to dive in headfirst.’”
Like many artists, McBryde was scared that getting sober would negatively impact her creative abilities.
“That’s the thing that keeps a lot of us out of therapy, [fearing] if I change this, there is no product,” McBryde says. “I was literally called ‘The Whiskey Drinking Badass’ when my first record came out and I felt like it was a compliment back then. So, you immediately go, ‘Is my music going to suck? Can I perform as dynamically as I did before?’ I thought it was going to take the rug out from under my feet creatively. What it did was just take the blindfold off.”
Four years later, not only has McBryde overcome those creative fears, but the Grammy winner is drawing on those experiences to create one of her most deeply introspective and personal albums yet with Wild, out Friday (May 8) on Warner Records Nashville.
Songs including “Behind Bars” and the brutally honest “Bottle Tells Me So” capture a myriad of previous attempts at sobriety, from switching alcohol brands to tracking each drink.
She recorded Wild with her road band Deadhorse and reunited with writer-producer and Brothers Osborne member John Osborne, whom she previously worked with on her 2022 collaborative project Lindeville. “What I took from Lindeville was wanting to work with John and be creative with him for hours, and having a group of songs I knew he would know what to do with. He absolutely nailed it,” McBryde says.
McBryde, who had been in the middle of an opening slot on Dierks Bentley’s Beers on Me Tour when she sought treatment in 2022, says many in Nashville’s music community, including Bentley and songwriter Travis Meadows, have been among her strongest supporters.
“The first person who made me feel like I wasn’t a complete weirdo was Dierks, because we were on his tour. He would check on me, and if we were in a social situation on the tour, he’d walk by and hand me a Starburst or a Jolly Rancher and just be like, ‘Hey, are you doing okay?’ and he’d say, ‘Don’t feel like you have to stay.’ Even at awards shows, I’d see him and he’d ask if I was okay. What great big brother behavior for him to exhibit. No one in his band or crew ever made me feel weird. They started stocking NA [non-alcoholic] beers all over the place. When I got back [from treatment], Dierks offered me a peanut butter and jelly sandwich and asked if I wanted to sit and talk.”
Meadows also became a key part of her support system. “When I would try and go a stint of not drinking and would ultimately fail, I would tell Travis, and he would just go, ‘I love you.’ He would not judge, he wasn’t like, ‘Oh, god, chick, it was only 16 days.’ He was like, ‘We’ll try again today, huh?’ I think the toughest part of deciding that I had to be sober is getting used to losing friends, because you lose most of them, but you do get to trade those for people that are very supportive.”
Sonically, the four songs that open Wild, including “Rattlesnake Preacher,” “Arkansas Mud,” “Creosote” and “Water in the River,” lean more heavily into her rock sensibilities, mirroring her high-octane live shows. “Rattlesnake Preacher” has been a fan-favorite in her concerts for years, but McBryde hadn’t found a suitable album home for it — until now.
“I was like, ‘That’s where we’ll start and everything else will show itself,’” McBryde says.
The themes in those songs set the stage early for the vulnerability that marks the album. “Rattlesnake Preacher,” “Arkansas Mud” and “Water in the River” touch on the emotional conflicts that arise from a childhood marked by a rigid and complex religious upbringing in rural Arkansas, and learning to find courage to forge one’s own path.
“That message was ground into me over and over, until you go, ‘Well, there’s nothing I can do to be good enough, smart enough, fast enough to ever change my station in this belief system.’ But to deliver it with some irreverence, I felt like it was necessary. The important thing is letting it be seen, so that other people can see it in themselves and be like, ‘Oh, you too, huh?’ It was daunting, but also really healing to be able to do it. It felt like I was doing the right thing to cover those themes in a way that would invite someone to feel a little less alone.”
“Hand Me Downs” looks at not only physical items often handed down in families, but inherited emotional qualities, both beneficial and detrimental. “Lines in the Carpet,” a takedown of soul-crushing marital disconnect and domesticity, is both a warning shot and a song McBryde deeply connected with.
“There are going to be men that hate that song, and good, because that’s who I’m singing to,” she says. “The line about ‘She’s just like ceramic about to break,’ when I heard that line, I was like, ‘This song is mine.’ I saw my mother’s face when I heard it, such a loyal woman who didn’t have the support that she needed at home, raising six kids. And the line, ‘When you’re born that pretty, you’ll get to be Miss Mississippi and nothing else,’ I thank the writers of this song [Lori McKenna, Lauren Hungate and Caroline Watkins] for writing it. It’ll expose some people that do feel that way, but it doesn’t condemn them to only feeling that way.”
Last August, McBryde opened Redemption Bar on the fifth floor at Eric Church’s Chief’s venue in downtown Nashville. The NA-forward Redemption Bar offers non-alcoholic and alcoholic beverages, in a relaxed environment that focuses on songwriters and live music.
“I always figured I’d have a coffee shop or a tattoo shop,” McBryde said, noting her manager, Q Prime’s John Peets, brought up the idea of a unique kind of bar. “We didn’t have a spot on Broadway where we can escape the chaos, that’s still fun. But let’s say you and the girls are going downtown and they want to do all the things and you want to listen to music and have a cocktail, you can do that. Or if you’re meeting a friend who’s still an avid drinker, that’s okay, too. Nobody’s going to give you sh-t about it either way.”
Her new music and the new space are testaments to her newfound outlook. “I would say something like, ‘I’m unrecognizable,’ but that’s not true. I think a good way to describe it would be a little clearer, because sh-t still makes me mad, but it makes me mad articulately. Things still make me anxious, but I can see them clearly. I may have chosen to live a sober life earlier if I had known what access I would have to joy. I had joy then, but the kind of access I have to joy now is just miles above that.”
