Carly Pearce recently announced that, after her sophomore Carly Pearce album was just released in February, she was already working on new music. The Kentucky native, who just announced her split from her husband, Michael Ray, credits her time off the road, along with the loss of her good friend and frequent collaborator, Busbee, with giving her the inspiration to be even more creative, and more honest, in her next set of tunes.
“I oddly just started to feel a rush of emotions of things that I felt like I wanted to say,” Carly recently shared with Everything Nash and other outlets. “Going through a lot of personal growth during this time and felt like I was hanging on to Busbee and had to kind of deal with that in its own time. It felt like it was jolted and sped up for me. We had some hard conversations of, do we continue on with this music or do we do something new? All of a sudden, I felt so creative and so much at peace. I felt like I had a lot to say that I didn’t know was in me. And maybe that’s because as an artist, not that you become a character, but you certainly go into autopilot of what you do every day.
“When I was making my second record, I would fly home to do laundry, to pack up, to leave by midnight, but then I’d have a write in there somewhere,” she added. “My head would just be somewhere else. And so this time I’ve just had time for the first time since I got a record deal to just write.”
Carly’s sophomore album included songs by several hit writers, including Thomas Rhett and Kelsea Ballerini, who along with Jesse Frasure and Ashley Gorley co-wrote Carly’s duet with Michael, “Finish Your Sentences,” and Luke Combs, who penned Carly’s recent No. 1 hit, “I Hope You’re Happy Now,” with Carly, Randy Montana and Jonathan Singleton. The 30-year-old hints that she might reach out to some of her famous friends for songs for her next set of tunes –- and would like to share some of her songs with them as well.
“There are some really amazing artists and songwriters in my class, and I want to celebrate that,” Carly said. “I love writing songs and I will always be a songwriter, but it was really cool for me to call on my friends that are artists. I had never written a song with another artist in my life until Luke and I wrote, but I was playing a radio show with him one day and was just like, ‘Man, I feel like we’re cut from the same cloth.’ I just went to him and I was like, ‘I know this is weird, but would you ever write a song with me?’ There’s just something that I feel like artists can bring to the table.
“Vocally artists can bring to the table, from a knowledge of being out on the road, and knowing kind of what people want and what people gravitate towards,” she continued. “I just think it’s really cool to see, and I think you’re going to see more and more of it with people like Thomas and Luke and Kelsea. And hopefully me. I would love to have cuts with other artists.”
Carly Pearce is available for purchase, download or stream via Amazon