Daniel Meigs
Ashley McBryde arrived on the mainstream country radar just a few short years ago, turning heads with an uncompromising take-me-or-leave-me attitude.
It was a welcome moment of substance over style in a genre struggling to prove it values female voices. But after being rewarded with a series of awards-show wins and three more nods at the Academy of Country Music (ACM) awards, she’s doubling down on Never Will (out April 3). … Just don’t expect her to be the face of someone else’s rebellion.
“I’m nobody’s poster child, but I’ll walk up this hill with anybody,” she says of the fight to get more women on country radio.
Walking her own line of country creativity, McBryde once again teamed with fellow anti-hero Jay Joyce to create her second album, turning in 11 bold songs with themes sunk deep in the status quo-challenging bedrock. Even the project’s fiery title track is all about throwing a middle finger up to her critics, and McBryde says that’s always been her approach.
“I call it reading the comments, and we don’t read the comments,” she explains just before rejoining Luke Combs’ What You See Is What You Get Tour. “Your opinion of me is seriously none of my business, and I don’t care if you like my hair today. Everybody’s got an opinion and all of them are conflicting, and the only person who can make choices for you is yourself. So we wrote ‘Never Will’ and the message is just about reading the comments – ‘I didn’t, I don’t, and I never will.’”
She may not be beholden to anyone, but she’s also not afraid to take sides in the genre’s biggest controversy: country radio’s well-documented practice of institutionalized gender bias. Simply put, female artists get only a fraction of the radio play males get, and since radio is still the dominant driver for country music discovery, the policy effectively caps the number of women in the genre’s mainstream. McBryde has seen it first hand.
“It’s just kind of funny that this is the time I get to step into the spotlight,” she says. “I really thought at the beginning of trying to break through, surely the horror stories I’m hearing about radio aren’t that bad. And it took about two weeks to go ‘Oh no, it’s seriously that bad.’”
Perhaps unsurprisingly for such an outspoken voice, she has yet to crack radio’s Top 30—despite the swell of artistic acclaim and a Top 10 debut album in Girl Goin’ Nowhere. But even with that bleak reality, McBryde’s hope for the future is woven throughout the songs on Never Will. She’s just more interested in effecting change on a personal level.
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“I do think it’s a cool time to be a chick with a guitar,” she explains.
The album’s opening salvo, “Hang In There Girl,” helps show her point of view. It was written after McBryde drove past a young girl on the roadside near her West Arkansas hometown, with the rising star recognizing herself in the hand-me-down outfit and kitchen-table haircut.
“Where I’m from you’re expected to get pregnant in high school and get married before you graduate,” she says. “So when I saw this girl kicking rocks at the end of the driveway, I remembered being frustrated and just wanting to be gone, and wanting more for myself.”
With a grungy garage-rock sound and McBryde’s brawny country vocals—at times resembling a tattooed Reba McEntire—the track is less a challenge to the patriarchy than a message of solidarity for any small-town dreamer hoping to follow her footsteps.
“It’s like that algebra teacher who told me, ‘That’s never gonna happen for you—you need to remember where you’re from.’ Those voices are all around you in towns like that,” McBryde admits. “Really, I just wanted a way to wrap my arms around her and say, ‘It’s seriously gonna be OK. It doesn’t feel like it, but in a couple of years, it’s gonna be OK.’”
The rest of the album sways from bad-decision ballads to agency-giving anthems like the single, “One Night Standards,” and from jaunty, drunk-in-public send-ups to the muscular “Martha Divine,” which puts an adolescent-revenge twist on a disturbing Kentucky-born legend of domestic abuse.
It all goes to show that while McBryde is an artist of principle—and a prime example of why women deserve the same opportunity as men—she’s also no one-trick pony. Still, when asked what she hopes listeners will take away from Never Will, she doesn’t hesitate.
“Mostly, I want people to remember that you can tell anybody to f*** off for any reason at any time,” she says with a laugh. “Now don’t get me wrong, kindness always, but you are allowed to say ‘This is not for me and it’s not welcome here.’ And if somebody is giving you hell, f*** ‘em and feed ‘em fish heads.”