Ashley McBryde is singing the praises of Miranda Lambert. The two, who toured together on Miranda’s 2019 Roadside Bars & Pink Guitars Tour, have remained friends, with Ashley invited to Miranda’s house with some of Miranda’s other girlfriends, with nothing on the agenda but a good time — a gesture that only made Ashley love her more.
“She had a couple of us gals out to her farm just for dinner just to have a girls night and trade wardrobe secrets, which I didn’t think I had any, but now I have some,” Ashley shared on Apple Music Country‘s The Ty Bentli Show. “And I’m telling you what, she’s just the best. She’s just the absolute best, and onstage? I’d like to think I work hard, but she and Gwen Sebastian, they’re so much like Eric [Church] in that they’re not going to leave anything. Every drop of sweat is going to come out. The makeup is going to run. The hair probably won’t fall flat, but that’s the way they perform.
“If she doesn’t leave everything on stage with you, then she didn’t give you your money’s worth,” she added. “That’s the way she feels about performing.”
Ashley just passed the ACM New Female Artist of the Year title, which she won in 2019, to Tenille Townes, but that’s not their only connection. In addition to both being rising superstars in country music, Ashley also previously — and uninentionally — connected with Tenille at CMA Fest, by accidentally stealing her guitar bag!
“I knew her name. I really hadn’t heard her stuff very much, but she was playing right before us I think,” Ashley recounted. “Her name was Tenille Townes, and at this point, I’ve not met this artist. And we play our show and we have a great, ‘See you later, guys.’ We get home and I opened up my gig bag because that’s where my Copenhagen is and I open it up, and where there should be many bottles and Copenhagen, there’s nothing.
“I look inside,” she continued. “That’s my guitar. I opened up the little top thing, which should be pics and capos and tuners, and there’s nothing. I have Tenille Townes’s gig bag. I have taken it. This is in the middle of CMA Fest. We have to find a way to contact her. And I can’t imagine what she’s thinking because she has to open the gig bag.”
Ashley and Tenille both share an ACM Award, for Music Event of the Year, for their “Fooled Around and Fell in Love” collaboration with Miranda.
Photo Credit: Courtesy of EB Media / Katie Kessel