With a brand new song to ride her off into the new year, Ashley McBryde tells C&I that she’s ready to take the reins, get after it, and join Cody Johnson on the road.
This new Ashley McBryde song isn’t just a cowboy song. There are pastures and prairies and circling wagons. But there’s a deeper meaning to the three-and-a-half-minute metaphor.
“Instead of us saying, ‘Work ethic’s out the window, stick-to-it code’s pretty much dead, and idealism is gone,’ it was easier to say that by saying there is no wild out west. That’s all gone,” McBryde told Cowboys & Indians a few days before the song’s release.
That conversation led to more conversation about being raised in Arkansas with a cowboy work ethic, and how that ultimately landed her in the role of one of country’s most cherished singer-songwriters.
C&I: You wrote this new song with longtime collaborators Chris Harris and Trick Savage. How did the three of you find a new song to write?
Ashley McBryde: We were in our venue dressing room in Phoenix. And Chris came up and said, “Whatever we write today, I just know there ain’t enough cowboy songs.” And then it’s like you threw one rawhide into the middle of several small terriers. Chris had his mandolin, and Trick and I had our guitars. We stopped two times to have a cigarette, which is one of my favorite parts of writing a song. I’ll go smoke it out. Sometimes when you take a drag of a cigarette, you come up with “ride off into the sunset.” That change of scenery lets the next thing pop into your head.
C&I: And did the song kind of write itself from there?
McBryde: This one was all about where we live and the genre we love, and realizing that the horse I rode in on got put out to pasture. I came from Arkansas, then I moved to Memphis, and then I was playing bars in Indiana, Kentucky, Oklahoma, Arkansas, Texas, and Louisiana. Then I moved to Nashville. You just keep working really hard, because if you work hard enough, you’ll get better at what you do and you’ll have the things that you work hard for. But that’s just not the way it is anymore.
C&I: It has changed. But let’s hope cowboy songs (or cowboy-adjacent) songs will at least be on in the background. What are a few that are always on your mind?
McBryde: “Rodeo” (Garth Brooks), “This Cowboy’s Hat” (Chris LeDoux), “I’ll Think of Something” (Mark Chestnutt) and “Single Mountain Fiddle” (Jared Hart).
C&I: What cowboy codes left a mark on you growing up in Arkansas?
McBryde: Well, our nearest neighbor was like eight miles away. And we traded on skills that we each had. So the neighbor says, “The dog just had a litter of puppies, so bring the kids down.” And we’d immediately found a way to repay that favor. My dad was an excellent conservationist, game warden, and a steward of the land. He’d drink his coffee on the back porch, and I’d watch him just staring out at the pasture where the horses were. I asked him what he was looking at, and he said, “You know, I can’t keep every single place from being overdeveloped, but I can keep this one from it.” That taught me the importance of conservation and the idea that you can’t do it all, but you can do what you can. Cowboys are the ones doing what needs to be done before it is an emergency. If you would simply be where you are, do what you say you’re gonna do and mean what you say when you say it, it would simplify a lot of things.
C&I: Was that middle-of-nowhere life a good thing or a bad thing?
McBryde: Some of my siblings looked at that as a prison. They thought, ‘There’s nothing to do out here.’ And I was going, ‘You could do anything out here.’ One time when I was about 13, I asked my dad if I could dig a hole in the ground. One big enough to get into. Because one of my favorite movies was Red Dawn with Patrick Swayze and Charlie Sheen. And there was a part when the bad guys are coming, they’d pop up out of these holes in the ground. There was nothing stopping me. I learned so many things. Like that it takes a few days to dig a hole when you’re a 13-year-old girl with just a shovel with a pickaxe.
C&I: So that life really made you who you are?
McBryde: It did. We are the way we sing. This isn’t a costume. I was delivering animals of all varieties from a very young age, and I didn’t always get to paint that in our music, but I also didn’t not do that. I just couldn’t always put a saddle on those themes.
C&I: You bookended this song with fiddle. It’s the intro and the outro. That is a lost art.
McBryde: One of the really great perks to my band is that we’re the band that’s on the record and the road. So with this song, we were so excited that maybe two shows after we wrote it, I played it for the band. I looked at our fiddle player and said, “I think fiddle is the first voice we need hear. Nothing’s gonna say that this song is a great one better than a fiddle can.”
C&I: Fans are going to love that part when you play this live. And you are such a good fit to tour with Cody Johnson.
McBryde: Tours are kind of a gamble. But when someone shakes your hand, looks right at you and knows your name, it’s lovely. Our bands and crews are both that way. And I’m really excited about playing for Cody’s fans, because they’re not only consumers of what’s hot, they’re also fans of what’s good.
C&I: Which is probably why his Leather album just won the Country Music Association’s album of the year. What did you think when they called his name?
McBryde: That a win like that’ll put hope back in you.
The “Maybe: Garth” Story
One of McBryde’s breakout hits from 2018 was her “Girl Goin’ Nowhere.” It’s an anthem for anyone who’s been discouraged but went on to pay dues, persevere, and end up validated. Shortly after its release, McBryde got a text from an unknown number. Her phone identified it as “Maybe: Garth.” It said, “Is this correct phone number for Ashley McBryde, and can I give you a call?” She said yes, and he called her to talk about her music and how much he loved “Girl Goin’ Nowhere.”
“I had no idea that he had planned on singing it,” she told C&I. But he did. And somebody at his Tacoma show took a video and shared it with her. He even recorded it as “Guy Goin’ Nowhere” for his own album later that year. “There just isn’t a bigger compliment for a songwriter. I still have him in my phone as ‘Maybe: Garth.’”
“Ain’t Enough Cowboy Songs” is out on December 6, 2024. Pre-save the song here.
PHOTOGRAPHY: Courtesy Katie Kauss
