On the title track of her new album Never Will, Ashley McBryde shrugs off all the doomsayers who predicted she’d never get beyond the bars and open-mic nights where she honed her craft. Over the midtempo thump of a Springsteenish roots-rock anthem, she echoes the countless warnings she heard along the way: “Where you’re going is a dead end / Playing in bars only makes you the star of a house band.”
The tune came out of a songwriting session between McBryde and Chris Harris, who’s also in her road band. Their bandmate, guitarist Matt Helmkamp, had emailed the sound file of a guitar riff he had just come up with, encouraging them to include it in a song. When McBryde and Harris matched words to that musical phrase, they landed on something that sounded like a mantra: “I didn’t. I don’t. I never will.”
“When you have a statement like that,” McBryde recalls, “that’s heavy. You can’t just back it up with fluff. You have to come up with a story that’s just as heavy. So we started talking about all the people who told us we’d never make it. We had a lot of the same experiences; most musicians do.”
They came up with the line, “I’d been gone long ago if I’d listened to what they were saying,” to set up the refrain, and the rest of the song wrote itself. The lyric highlights McBryde’s allegiance to her road band and the importance of the rock in her country-rock sound. And it reflects her ongoing struggle to defy conventional wisdom and forge a different kind of country music career.
McBryde’s efforts are ongoing, because she still hasn’t gotten where she wants to go, despite numerous triumphs. Her success with critics was highlighted in the Scene’s Country Music Critics’ Poll, where she was voted the best New Act of 2018, and her breakout LP Girl Going Nowhere was the poll’s third-best album. Both that album and Never Will, released April 3, have landed in the top 10 on Billboard’s Top Country Albums chart. She also received new-artist honors from the CMA, the ACM and CMT, and she scored two Grammy nominations.
For all that, however, McBryde has still labored at country radio. She hasn’t had a song rise higher than No. 23 on the radio-determined Hot Country Songs chart. She has received a lot of advice about how to change that: lose some weight, straighten your hair, add more pop, use Music Row writers. Her response: “I didn’t. I don’t. I never will.”
In fact, she doubles down on her contrarian approach with this follow-up album. The rock-flavored songs hit harder than ever, but there is also an old-time country song in the Carter Family mode, and a couple of folk-rock singer-songwriter songs. When McBryde does lean country, it’s old-fashioned, sinful country: songs about compulsive drinking, unglamorous sex and violent revenge. Bravest of all is “Shut Up Sheila,” a song poking fun at an overly pious relative — perhaps country music’s most overt skepticism of religion since Kacey Musgraves’ “Merry Go ’Round.”
“I was told that your second album has to prove your first wasn’t a fluke,” McBryde says. “But you have to be mindful that you should only change what you want to change and stay true to who you are.”
And that’s what she’s done: She’s broadened her sound to include things she’s always done live — like the mountain music and folkie stuff — but refused to add anything that wasn’t already part of her toolkit. The result is an album even stronger than its predecessor.
McBryde had self-released two LPs and an EP during her apprenticeship years, but her first widely distributed album was Girl Going Nowhere. The title track of that record was also a tale of persisting in the face of doubters. It was inspired by a true story about her high school algebra teacher in Arkansas mocking her ambition to move to Nashville and write songs for the radio. It was such a gleeful “I told you so” that Garth Brooks adopted it for his live shows.
If “Girl” was the high school version of that theme, “Never Will” is the college version. It recalls the years when McBryde was attending Arkansas State University and playing the bars in nearby Memphis.
“Like a college degree,” she recalls, “those years in the bars are something no one can take away from me. I wouldn’t trade that education for anything in the world. There weren’t any books, but I learned a lot. People would go, ‘Oh, you’re in a bar band,’ and I’d say, ‘Yeah, that’s one of the coolest things you can do.’ ”
What did she learn? How to lead a band. How to add enough rock to country to pull people’s attention away from the TV screens. How to sneak the increasing number of originals she was writing into the set list by pretending they were covers.
“I stopped saying, ‘This is an original song,’” she explains, “because for a lot of people that’s a signal to go to the bathroom. I would just play the song. One of them might come up later and say, ‘That song about the break-up; who did that?’ and you say, ‘Oh, I wrote that.’ That puts the song in a different light.”
She learned how to take a plastic gas can, cut the top off, and write “Gas” with a dollar sign on the front as a tip jar.
“People may not want to give you a tip,” she adds, “but they’ll help you get home. You can look at all the singles in there at the end of the night and say, ‘Crap, I only made $80 tonight.’ Or you can go, ‘Man, each slip of paper is a person who made a decision to acknowledge us and what we do.’ ”
She learned how to deliver a classic country cheating song without apology, too. One such classic is the first single from the new album. “One Night Standards” features lines like: “No king bed covered in roses / Just a room without a view / I don’t want a number you ain’t gonna answer / Let’s just stick to the one-night standards.” To finish the song, McBryde and her frequent collaborator Nicolette Hayford called in Nashville’s top-ranked song doctor, Shane McAnally.
“When we’re writing with someone like Shane or Lori McKenna,” says McBryde, “Nicolette and I have to meet in the parking lot beforehand and tell each other, ‘It’s going to be all right. You’ll be fine.’ Once we got inside, I was talking about the night stand between the two beds in a motel room, and I said, ‘It’s a one-night stand; it’s a one-night standard.’ And Shane said, ‘One-night standards — that’s it.’ A lot of the time, the best-known writer in the room won’t come up with the line, but he or she will sniff it out as the hook when it passes by.”
McBryde didn’t co-write “Shut Up Sheila,” but as soon as she heard Hayford sing it, McBryde knew she had to record it, even if the chorus described a funeral like this: “We don’t sing ‘Amazing Grace.’ We don’t read from the Bible / We just go about letting go in our own way.”
“It’s about a grandmother’s funeral from an entirely different angle from anything in country music history,” says McBryde. “It’s about that one relative who doesn’t know when to shut up. Everyone’s got a Sheila in their family; I’ve got two of them. Not everyone gets a chance to set that person straight, but Nicolette and Charles [Chisholm, her co-writer] set her straight, so now you don’t have to.”
The album also includes “Stone,” a sobering song about losing a brother to death — as happened to both McBryde and Hayford. “First Thing I Reach For,” whose title is completed by the phrase, “is the last thing I need,” is a classic country lament about bad decisions, whether the narrator is reaching for brown liquor in a bottle or a stranger on a mattress. “Sparrow,” co-written with Brandy Clark and others, is a smartly ambivalent song about the touring life, balancing the thrill of a boisterous audience with the ache of missing the family left behind.
The album’s opener, “Hang in There Girl,” is another variation on the theme of “Don’t let the naysayers get you down.” In this case, the narrator is not McBryde as a high school or college student, but as a working professional who drives down a rural road and sees her former self in a 15-year-old girl checking the mailbox in front of a run-down single-wide trailer. “I know too well that look in her eyes,” McBryde sings. “I’ve been right there at the end of that drive / Hang in there, girl, you’re gonna be all right.”
And the singer believes the future of country music is going to be OK too.
“I think our listeners are as smart as we tell them they are,” she says. “And in this genre, we too often tell them they aren’t that smart. I was co-writing with someone at a publisher’s once, and I threw out a line. He said, ‘Whoa, you need to shoot low, because the listeners are riding ponies.’ We don’t need to be all artsy and Shakespearean, but we don’t have to be dumb either. If we just talk to them about real life in their own language, it’s gonna be all right.”
