Carly Pearce knows what it looks like when a dream comes true. She also knows that success doesn’t heal all wounds.
Her forthcoming album, Honest Woman, will be available soon. The personal triumph arrives after a career built on country radio hits, Grand Ole Opry membership, sold-out shows, a GRAMMY Award, and songs that turned her heartbreak into connection with her fans.
From her early days in Taylor Mill, Kentucky, to performing five shows a day at Dollywood as a teenager, Pearce’s life has often looked like a country music fairytale. But Honest Woman fills in the parts that don’t fit neatly into Cinderella’s boot-scootin’ fairytale. The album details the doubts, the loneliness, the public heartbreak, and the work of becoming whole again.
Pearce has been open about healing from her 2020 divorce from a fellow country singer.
“The insecurities are real — am I enough?” she says. “Am I lovable?”
On Honest Woman, she doesn’t rush to answer those questions with a storybook ending. Instead, she lets listeners hear her sorting through her insecurities in real time.
That honesty runs through “Happy for Myself,” her favorite song on the album. The idea came unexpectedly while Pearce was standing in a jewelry store with a friend, and she realized she felt jealous.
“No matter where people are in life, like your friend is getting married or has a boyfriend or somebody’s getting pregnant, all of us can feel left behind,” she says. “I didn’t even know that that mattered to me until that moment.”
For all the milestones Pearce has collected — awards, platinum records, chart-toppers, and major tours — she says her understanding of fulfillment has changed.
“I have a shelf full of awards … that didn’t fulfill me like I thought it would,” she says.
What does matter now is more personal.
“The girl in the grocery store who tells me a song saved her,” Pearce says. “The conversations. That’s what matters.”
That clarity also changed what Pearce wanted from love. On album track “He Don’t Like My Dogs,” written with Jordan Reynolds, Lauren Hungate, and Emily Weisband, she draws a playful but firm line in the sand.
“He don’t like my dogs, that was red flag number one,” she sings.
Pearce laughs that she manifested boyfriend Jordan Karcher — an entrepreneur and dog rescue advocate — while writing the song. The two met on a dating app.
“I literally found the love of my life at a time when I could accept it and was ready for it,” she says.
Karcher, she says, more than passed the dog test.
“Now I’m with literally the most dog-loving activist,” Pearce says, adding that he had one concern when he heard the song: “He said, ‘You have to make sure people don’t think this song is about me.’”
It wasn’t about him. Not exactly. It was about knowing what she wanted and what she deserved.
“I knew that I was going to have love,” she says. “I just didn’t know how.”
Pearce also explores chemistry and tension on “If I Don’t Leave I’m Gonna Stay,” her duet with Riley Green. She reached out to him herself.
“I texted him myself,” she says. “I just felt like our voices would work together.”
Green agreed.
“I’ve been a huge fan of Carly and her voice for a long time,” he says, noting the harmonies felt unique and different.
The song’s will-they-or-won’t-they energy got people talking, but Pearce laughs off the speculation.
“It’s acting!” she says.
Still, the duet fits the emotional world of Honest Woman — an album that holds heartbreak, humor, faith, longing, independence, and love in the same frame.
By the time Pearce arrives at CMA Fest the first week in June, this chapter will look less like a comeback and more like a woman standing fully inside her own life. She hopes listeners hear that, too.
“You’re not alone,” she says. “It gets better. The hard things … they’re part of the story. They’re just not the whole story anymore.”