Ashley McBryde moved to Nashville nearly 20 years ago propelled by the same youthful optimism and single-minded ambition that had pushed generations of country music dreamers before her. Then, on Day 2 of her life here, she walked into a karaoke bar on the city’s east side.
“This gorgeous woman is onstage, singing ‘All by Myself,’” she said on a recent afternoon, briefly rising from her chair and breaking into a note-perfect rendition of Eric Carmen’s 1975 soft-rock classic. “It sounded better than the recording. And it’s a karaoke bar. I was like, ‘I’m going to die. I’m never going to make it.’”
As it turned out, neither of McBryde’s predictions that night came true, though in both cases, she’s come disconcertingly close. In fact, as she relayed this tale, she did so from a table in a dimly lit establishment that is itself a testament to exactly how wrong she was.
Ashley McBryde’s Redemption Bar occupies the fifth floor of Chief’s, Eric Church’s towering restaurant and live music complex that sits on a prominent corner of Lower Broadway, the kitschy beating heart of the city’s country music-themed entertainment district. If becoming a Grand Ole Opry member signifies acceptance by Nashville’s glitterati, having your own apostrophe-ed space on Broadway indicates the undeniable whiff of superstardom.
Within a couple blocks of Chief’s, neon lights, loud music and drink specials lure visitors to one bedazzled exercise in brand extension after another: Jason Aldean’s Kitchen + Rooftop Bar, Luke Bryan’s 32 Bridge, Jelly Roll’s Goodnight Nashville, Blake Shelton’s Ole Red, Miranda Lambert’s Casa Rosa. By comparison, McBryde’s Redemption Bar — which features a small stage flanked by red velvet curtains and a stained-glass rendering of the Grammy-winning singer and songwriter it’s named for on one wall, arms wide open — feels low-key.
The bar opened last year and primarily serves nonalcoholic drinks. It takes its name from an early McBryde song, the snarling, guitar-heavy “Redemption,” which she wrote about a bottle of whiskey. Although McBryde’s music has often leaned hard into country music’s romantic notions about drinking — her 2017 breakout hit, “A Little Dive Bar in Dahlonega” celebrates “singin’ along with your drink raised” — her perspective changed dramatically when she got sober in 2022. On her fifth studio album, “Wild,” due May 1, alcohol is still a featured player but no longer her story’s conquering hero.
“If this ain’t bottom, it’s as far down as I ever want to go / The party’s over and as always, I’m the last one to know,” she sings over fingerpicked acoustic guitar on the dusty ballad “Bottle Tells Me So.” The gentle tear-jerker “Behind Bars” looks back at liquor-soaked years with nostalgia and regret.
“I don’t hate that part of my life,” she said. “I had a great time until things became a problem. Now, I’m doing what I can to solve those problems.”
McBryde, 42, arrived at Redemption Bar wearing jeans and brown boots, with sleeves of tattoos bursting from under a brown T-shirt. Throughout a conversation that continued into the afternoon at the studio of the “Wild” producer John Osborne, McBryde was earnest and animated, frequently breaking into laughter, occasionally into tears and repeatedly into song.
McBryde grew up one of six siblings on an Arkansas farm. Her father was a preacher, farmer and emergency room physician. As a child, McBryde worked tirelessly to win his affection.
“He’s a really hard person to be close to so I became good at things that interested him,” she said. “That meant firearm responsibility, whittling, survival skills, stuff like that.”
Her father also played guitar, and McBryde took to it before she was old enough to lift it onto her lap.
“Going to my room to play music was complete freedom from a really religious, very strict household,” she said. “Whatever I had to do to feel that freedom is what I was going to do. It never crossed my mind that I wouldn’t someday leave home, move to Nashville and write songs.”
Her father was dead set against it, while her mother was an “underground tunnel system of love,” she said. “Super supportive, super affectionate.” Her parents divorced when McBryde was 17, by which time her relationship with her father had deteriorated and her determination to make music her life was undiminished.
McBryde attended Arkansas State University on a music scholarship but dropped out a few credits short of graduation to move to Nashville. Initially, she lived in a storage unit and strung together a living playing coffee shops, sports bars and biker joints around the Southeast. In an era when country music’s gatekeepers had very specific ideas about how female artists should look, McBryde didn’t fit the mold.
The songwriter Terri Jo Box met McBryde during these years after seeing her perform at a songwriters’ night at a Nashville pub.
“I remember thinking, ‘This girl’s a hidden treasure who spends most of her time running the roads of Arkansas, Tennessee and Kentucky,’” said Box, who has writing credits on three songs on “Wild.” “Nashville doesn’t even know what they’ve got. I hollered at her across the parking lot after the show, ‘Hey! Be in my office tomorrow, 11 o’clock! We’re going to write a song!’”
That was the beginning of a fruitful songwriting partnership. In 2016, a song the two wrote with Trick Savage, “Bible and a .44,” a tender portrait inspired by McBryde’s father, garnered plaudits from stars like Church and Garth Brooks. Three years later, McBryde’s major label debut, “Girl Goin’ Nowhere,” was nominated for a Grammy, and McBryde was named new artist of the year at the CMAs.
McBryde’s professional successes came amid personal tragedies, including the suicide of her older brother and the death of Randall Clay, a songwriter she’d been close to, in quick succession in 2018, then a near-fatal horseback riding accident in 2021 that left her with multiple broken bones and a serious concussion. McBryde had long been a heavy drinker — “80 percent of my identity was how much I could drink,” she said — but with time, booze’s efficacy as a coping mechanism waned.
“It was how I escaped the darkness for so long,” she said. “Then good, old patient alcohol was like, ‘Joke’s on you. I am the darkness.’”
She tried repeatedly to quit drinking but could never white-knuckle her way to sobriety. It says something about McBryde’s go-getter personality though that she essentially arranged her own intervention while blackout drunk one night in 2022, calling her therapist, who arrived the following morning with her friends in tow.
“Even drunk me knew, ‘She’s gonna die,’” McBryde said. “What made me have to stop drinking was the possibility of self-harm. After losing my brother to suicide, I was so scared that that’s somehow genetic.”
McBryde’s 2023 album, “The Devil I Know,” was filled with drinking songs — “Women Ain’t Whiskey,” “Cool Little Bars,” “Whiskey and Country Music” — most of which she’d written before getting sober. In many ways, the album is a paean to “Blackout Betty,” McBryde’s drunken alter ego and the title of its most caustic track. For “Wild,” she had an entirely new story to tell.
“Being that close to taking my own life that many times and then not dying sounds good as a record,” she said.
“Wild” flexes the sort of big, loud guitar riffs and swampy rhythms that have long been in McBryde’s toolbox but feels less constrained by convention.
“We wanted to make more of a rock album than your typical country album,” said Osborne, who’d previously produced McBryde’s collaborative 2022 album, “Ashley McBryde Presents: Lindeville.” “She has become a lot more comfortable in her own skin, but her fire has not changed one bit.”
In the past, McBryde had been “guided away from” several of the more rock-oriented songs on “Wild,” including “Rattlesnake Preacher,” “Water in the River” and “Creosote,” because, she said, “they weren’t going to work for mainstream radio.” This time, “very much from a place of spite and anger, I said, ‘What if I’d died and these songs aren’t on a record? Shame on me.’”
“Rattlesnake Preacher” was written by her late friend Clay, but coming out of McBryde’s mouth it feels like an undeniable reckoning with her father’s legacy. “The song is about how my daddy was a rattlesnake and a preacher,” she said. In recent years, the father-daughter bond has thawed. “The phrase ‘I’m proud of you’ finally came out of his mouth, which was life-changing,” she said.
Travis Meadows, a singer and songwriter who has known McBryde for more than a decade and who co-wrote the album’s shuffling closer, “Ten to Midnight,” believes listeners gravitate to the honesty and vulnerability in McBryde’s songs.
“It never feels like somebody trying to write a song you want to hear,” he said.
McBryde wants that authenticity to be her legacy.
“I hope I play shows until you see the headline, ‘Opry Member Ashley McBryde Drops Dead Onstage,’” she said, laughing sharply. “I hope I go down in history as she was who she sings she is.”
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