Ashley McBryde on Her New Album ‘Wild,’ Embracing Sobriety & Inviting Listeners ‘To Feel a Little Less Alone’
Categoria: Musica
McBryde leans into her rock influences and weighty themes on her John Osborne-produced new album.
Por Billboard | 08/05/2026
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 Osbo