NASHVILLE 2023 SPECIAL: ASHLEY MCBRYDE

If Jackson Browne’s seminal recorded-on-the-road Running on Empty were the field guide to rock 'n' roll life on a Silver Eagle bus, Ashley McBryde’s The Devil I Know is the compass for kids chasing the dream in a banged-up van.

Sure, she was nominated for a Country Album Grammy last year for Ashley McBryde Presents Lindeville —as she was in 2019 for Girl Goin’ Nowhere and 2021 for Never Will, plus County Song and Country Vocal Performance in 2020 for “Girl Goin’ Nowhere”—as well as winning 2022’s Country Duo/Group Performance for “Never Wanted to Be That Girl,” which she co-wrote with Carly Pearce, but she’s lived a life on the verge for a long, long time.

More ruminative than crazed, the Saddle, Arkansas-born ragged rock/country songwriter delivers an exhale of acceptance that the chase is as much the reward as superstardom. Rather than raging against what’s not happening, she delivers a clear-eyed celebration of how alive being in the moment feels, a wry smile for the bathroom stall dressing rooms, Adderall-fueled all-night drives, the win/lose “being one break from blowing up” and the power of whiskey, cool little bars and country music.

That one break seems inevitable. Like objects in the mirror, it’s closer than it appears.

With her road band and producer Jay Joyce, she moves from softly intimate to full-throttle, jagged-edged rock in the space of a single song. “The Devil I Know” uses phased vocals for what people tell her, a soft tone caresses the vices she loves—and can be hard-charging when the verse and chorus pick up steam.

The guitars have big treads and the drums pummel down on “Black Out Betty,” which recalls the glory days of AOR. Badass, side-mouthed vocals, all attitude and brutal assessment of a drunk whose time has come; the ballast is hangover pounding—and the details fall in a torrent of all the ways bottom gets hit—then splatters.

McBryde also continues her Loretta Lynn/K.T. Oslin everywoman truth-telling. With a silky delivery on “Single at the Same Time,” she’s philosophical about the chemistry that never aligned with availability. That same warm, arms-wrapped-around-you comfort infuses “Light On in the Kitchen,” its bright mandolin embellishments sparkling as McBryde’s lower range unfurls life wisdom for the lost that her mother gave her. It’s the same classic country that made The Judds bedrock for many suburban and rural families.

She borrows Wynonna’s slow, simmering soul to stain the sobering “Women Ain’t Whiskey” with clear-eyed rejoinder. Explaining the difference between something you pick up and abandon against a self-respecting woman’s reality, she smolders with a vibrance that makes her refusal the sexiest thing of all.

Life’s crags and betrayals get wide-open recognition instead of strident drama or soggy victimhood. “Learned to Lie” is memoir in less than four minutes, tracing the perfidies that shape us, while “6th of October” tracks her own fuckups, failures and reckoning, stacking the facts to her own sobriety.

Not that Devil’s a crawling-from-the-doublewide record. Rather it celebrates how the world goes around, life goes on and we can all fly if we’ll just let go of the rails. “Coldest Beer in Town” reaps joy in the cliches and come-ons, its track euphorically bubbling; the acoustic guitar-driven, train-beat propelled “Cool Little Bars” praises the off-the-beaten-path local joints, those hole-in-the-wall propositions in a world determined to be flossier, glossier and bossier.

Ribald, earthy, scrappy, she’s a long way from indie releases, being championed by iconoclast Eric Church and winning Vocal Event Awards with Miranda Lambert, Elle King, Caylee Hammack, Tenille Townes and Maren Morris to co-writing the awkward stumble “Making Lovers Out of Friends” with Rodney Crowell and the country/rap insurrective truth “Unlive” with Jelly Roll. With Devil, she’s set to finally break wide open.