Inside Ashley McBryde's fearless journey to her new album 'The Devil I Know'

Ashley McBryde's been so good for so long at the arts of country music and rock 'n' roll that you'd believe her to be at least somewhere near halfway toward Dolly Parton's standard-setting 25 No. 1 country hits or 10 Grammy wins.

Shockingly, the artist who released her fourth studio album this month, "The Devil I Know," has only one of each.

However, those numbers will undoubtedly change based on McBryde's latest.

Her most honestly personal work to date is well-defined by the homespun and finger-picked words of wisdom in the album's lead single, "Light On In The Kitchen," and fostered by "cool little bars" (which doubles as the name of an album track) an hour south of Louisville where ashtrays with cigarettes smoked to the filter, jukeboxes spinning Southern rock and shots of whiskey drank outnumber the number of cosmopolitan tourists taking selfies by a factor of at least of 10 to 1.

"This album makes you tell on yourself," whispers the newly-minted Grand Ole Opry member and native of the border of Arkansas and Oklahoma into the microphone at downtown Nashville's Analog venue at the Hutton Hotel.

She's onstage about to play the bittersweetly lovelorn ballad "Single At The Same Time" with a full band on a late August evening, debuting her album to a room of colleagues, co-writers, friends, journalists and executives from her label, Warner Music Nashville.

"The scariest thing about this is that I'm playing this music in front of people who know me, so I can't tell any lies," McBryde jokes.

McBryde's most significant career leaps have been on the back of her most personally honest material.

A half-decade ago, McBryde was 10 years into working in a "10-year town" and wrote her breakout single "Girl Goin' Nowhere."

Co-written with Jeremy Bussey, the homage to the legacy of her songwriting hero Guy Clark tells the story of her father purchasing her first guitar and projecting joyous moments when her family and friends back in Arkansas congratulate her on her stardom.

McBryde's latest album works because it fills the space her words opened in that hit single.

To The Tennessean, her manager, Q Prime Entertainment's John Peets, notes that McBryde's arrival as a top-tier artist in country's mainstream will benefit from a treasure trove of a decade's worth of material from not just her but co-writers Benjy Davis, Shelly Fairchild and Nicolette "Pillbox Patti" Hayford, and producer Jay Joyce. The group has arrived at a "distilled" elite level of fearless confidence.

"Being committed to concentrated, succinct creativity creates powerful, sensitive music that reveals [McBryde's] most talented, authentic self," continues Peets.

"The Devil I Know" follows in the footsteps of the 2022 album "Lindeville." That album's nuanced showcase of rural, working-class Americans who enjoy, as McBryde said, "drinking wine and talking s***" resonated with a sector of country's growing mainstream fanbase more likely to enjoy the genre via whispers in the wind than elaborate marketing campaigns.

At a February "full cast" performance of the character-study album from beginning to end (featuring Brandy Clark, Fairchild, Hayford, Lainey Wilson, Charlie Worsham, Nashville drag queens Britney Banks, Shelby Lá Banks, Vidalia Anne Gentry, Vivica Steele and Justine Van de Blair and more), McBryde received as many standing ovations as there were tracks on the recording.

Peets regards the moment as an essential showcase that rewarded how well McBryde has synergized the genre's stereotypical sonic signatures, social traditions and community values.

"To be validated so powerfully answers the question of Ashley's right to be so joyously in control of herself as an unpretentious beacon of vulnerable openness," Peets said.

Songs like the hard-charging, reflective rock anthem "Made For This" would not have worked so comfortably in prior eras in McBryde's career, when songs like "Martha Divine" and "One Night Standards" were phenomenal stories but perhaps not wholly connected with McBryde's earnest soul and those of her fanbase.

However, the song's tale of late nights on the road filled with equal parts Adderall and alcohol benefits from McBryde's fanbase now residing in what Peets refers to as a "net" built on "broadly comfortable relatability" in an era that Country Music Association CEO Sarah Trahern calls the country music industry opening it's "biggest tent" to growing interest.

Songs like the album's title song or the hopeful yet heartbreaking "Learned To Lie" (the song is a frank reckoning with her childhood awareness of the strain in her parents' relationship to each other — and her) reflect McBryde in control of her art, creativity, narrative — and likely, given the recent groundswell of support for her career — top position on any and every chart currently used to measure country music success.

If ERNEST opened a door for modern homages to George Jones with his 2022 Morgan Wallen collaboration "Flower Shops," the McBryde track "Whiskey and Country Music" brazenly strolls through that portal. Sounding akin to something crafted with Joe Cocker or Otis Redding in mind, but falling into "The Possum's" hands after a weekend bender, it's an anthem's anthem.

"Ashley's in the business of not just hitting No. 1, but making sure there's an a** in the seat every 18 inches at the live shows, too," Peets says.

When asked, point blank, what is the greatest accomplishment he's seen in this evolutionary chapter of McBryde's career, her manager pauses and makes his frankest statement yet.

"Ashley McBryde's calling in life is to play and write music. In that calling, this album finds her to unquestionably be a winner at life."

As expected, McBryde is much more forthright when assessing her career at present onstage during her performance.

"I ain't scared."

This article originally appeared on Nashville Tennessean: Ashley McBryde's fearless journey to her new album 'The Devil I Know'