Music

Ashley McBryde is sitting in a hotel room in Oxford, Miss., cracking up, thinking about the people who tried to tell her what to do. People like the staff at her first publisher, who laid out their version of Music Row Songwriting 101 to her early on.

“It was like, ‘Here’s who’s cutting records — so there can’t be any cursing, and it can’t be about drinking or staying the night with anyone,’ ” McBryde recalls. “What am I going to write about, corn dogs? That was really challenging, and the songs were terrible.”

The singer-songwriter can laugh about it now. Three critically acclaimed albums, six Grammy nominations and one win later, the 39-year-old Arkansas native has carved out a sweet spot between niche Americana and stadium-scale country-pop, where songwriting matters more than anything else.

But crafting that niche took McBryde years of pounding the Nashville pavement — so by the time she got the aforementioned unsatisfying publishing deal, she had honed her ability to work a crowd through endless bar gigs. “The music wasn’t as unusual as the way that she spoke,” Warner Music Nashville co-president Cris Lacy recalls of a 3rd & Lindsley showcase where McBryde performed in 2016. “There was a really clever wit and a different type of storytelling just in her banter.”

WMN held back, “just wanting to watch for a while,” in Lacy’s words, but manager John Peets signed on immediately after that show. “I’ll do this right now. This is amazing and doesn’t sound like anything else,” Peets remembers thinking. He told McBryde: “You never have to write a song that you hate ever again.”

McBryde’s differences from most prospective Nashville hit-makers drew Peets to her. “She was kind of on the front end of that regrounding in traditional country sounds that we’ve been seeing,” says Peets. “She wasn’t a 19-year-old blonde girl, either.”

With Peets’ help — putting her in rooms with veteran songwriters and encouraging her to write personal, honest songs — McBryde refined her writing to better match the sharp, between-songs banter that audiences had found so appealing. With her 2016 EP, Jalopies & Expensive Guitars, McBryde felt much closer to finding her voice. “Finally, I was like, ‘Oh, yeah. This tastes like the meal I would prepare,’ ” she says. It included “Bible and a .44,” a vivid, heartfelt homage to her father that helped her break through after fellow Peets client Eric Church invited her to sing it onstage at one of his shows; Lacy signed her to WMN soon after.

Since then, this year’s Country Power Players Groundbreaker has found success without much help from country radio. After more than a decade in the business and seven years on the country charts, McBryde has notched only one No. 1 song on Billboard’s Country Airplay list: her 2021 duet with Carly Pearce, “Never Wanted To Be That Girl.”

“It does piss me off when someone walks out of their mother’s womb into headlining arenas and releasing songs that go No. 1 instantly, 1,000%,” McBryde says. “Because if I put that person who skipped all the steps in a single bar I played in North Little Rock that’s full of bikers and truckers, they couldn’t catch anyone’s attention.”

Radio’s failure to reflect McBryde’s rise speaks to its entrenched problem of gender inequity. “It’s not because female artists haven’t been consistently making great music,” she says. “It’s just that it’s easier to play songs on the radio that sell trucks. I guess it’s sort of pendulum-like, and I think things are starting to swing back in a more equal direction.”

In her songs, McBryde is never explicitly political — yet she also doesn’t shy from topics like religion and inclusivity. “I was raised in a really, really rigid, strict Church of Christ home,” she says. “I was really successfully trained to fear, and we know that hate comes along with fear.” She’ll skip “Shut Up Sheila,” a potent rebuke of an imagined Bible-thumping relative off 2020’s Never Will, at some tour stops (it uses the word “goddamn”), but the refrain of “Gospel Night at the Strip Club” — “Hallelujah, Jesus loves the drunkards and the whores and the queers” — will never be censored. “It felt really good to say,” McBryde says of the track from 2022’s Lindeville, which, like Never Will, was nominated for best country album at the Grammys.

McBryde long wondered if she would ever get to the heart of Music Row, and now that she has, she still sometimes questions if she belongs. “You can’t change the direction the machine is going unless you’re inside it,” McBryde says. “You can’t change any of the rules unless you understand how it is played.”

Now she’s just trying not to push herself as hard as she felt she had to in those early days. She’s still working through the effects of a serious 2021 horseback riding accident and fought so hard to resume touring that at one point she was pushed up to the side stage in a wheelchair, then wheeled back to bed after her set. “On one hand, I’m a woman of country music, damn it, and this is what the f–k we’re made of,” she says. “On the other hand, something groundbreaking was learning to just stop and take care of myself.

“That’s something that’s different for me than it has ever been: I’m not in a hurry anymore,” McBryde concludes. “We’re good. It’s going to happen.”

This story will appear in the June 3, 2023, issue of Billboard.