Carly Pearce knew that after the success of “I Hope You’re Happy Now” and the reaching out she did to Luke Combs to write the song, and Lee Brice to sing it with her…if there was an artist she wanted to work with, she’d ask that person.
Carly has known Ashley McBryde for years as the two would see each other around Music City, and would sometimes end up at singer-songwriter shows together.
So, when it came time to start creating songs for 29:Written In Stone, Carly’s latest album that recently came out, she thought it was finally time to see if Ashley wanted to collaborate.
It didn’t take long for Carly to have her answer as Ashley shot back a “Yes!” to the request.
As they got together to work on a track, it turns out that Carly and Ashley were in the same mindset from the get-go.
Carly shares, “We got in the same room, and I was hoping that she would want to write a duet, and she actually later has told me that she was hoping that I wanted to write a duet too.”
Carly adds, “We referenced…as you do, when you’re writing, some of the big female-female duets…especially ‘Does He Love You’ and we did not even want to try even think that we could write something remotely close to that…so we steered away from that.”
“Does He Love You” was a duet by Reba McEntire, and Linda Davis (who is the mom to Lady A‘s Hillary Scott – who is on tour with Carly Pearce right now with the What A Song Can Do tour). The number-one hit was one of the new songs included on Reba’s Greatest Hits Volume Two when it came out in 1993.
The duet that did result from Carly and Ashley’s getting together was “Never Wanted To Be That Girl.”
Ashley says “I think we discussed a couple of, not really exchanging stories about being cheated on, but some scenarios that could happen. How does other girl meet guy? How does this happen? And I think we started with the first line. We were just talking about what if it were as innocent as needing help changing a tire because you weren’t wearing the proper clothing or you just got your nails done or whatever. To change the tire and then that dude says, ‘We should go get a beer.’ You would. And if you hit it off you would keep doing it. So, we just started at the top left-hand corner of the page.”
Carly adds “I know, right? We kind of wrote it as it was going in real time. (Ashley ‘Yeah.’) And, you know, for me, I felt like I was in a season with Shane (McAnally) where we just could all feel in the room what kind of thing we were gonna write, and it just kinda was the matter of landing on the right way to do it.”
Ashley, “We didn’t know exactly how the story was gonna turn out. We just kinda found out as we wrote it.”
“Never Wanted To Be That Girl” from Carly Pearce & Ashley McBryde is one of the 15-tracks on Carly’s 29: Written In Stone – which is available now.