ARTISTS CONTACT PRESS RELEASE ASHLEY McBRYDE EARNS FOURTH CAREER RECORDING ACADEMY NOMINATION WITH NEVER WILL Critically Acclaimed Follow-Up to Girl Going Nowhere Scores McBryde’s Second Nomination for Best Country Album 2021 Nod Follows Nominations for Best Country Song and Best Country Solo Performance with “Girl Goin’ Nowhere” NASHVILLE, Tenn. – Ashley McBryde released Never Will via Warner Music Nashville in April of this year to critical acclaim, earning a title early on as one of the best albums of the year to-date by Rolling Stone, SPIN, Variety, Billboard, Paste, Esquire, Stereogum and American Songwriter – even prior to announcing its title, the record made its way onto NPR and Rolling Stone’s most-anticipated albums of 2020. Now, the 2019 ACM New Female Artist and CMA New Artist of the Year is a four-time GRAMMY nominee with today’s announcement of Never Will earning her second nomination for Best Country Album, following Girl Going Nowhere, which was the only debut album to receive a nod in 2019. This year’s nomination follows her 2020 nominations for her breakout smash “Girl Goin’ Nowhere,” cowritten with Jeremy Bussey, for Best Country Song and Best Country Solo Performance. “To have the Recording Academy – made up of our peers and fellow creators – recognize so many powerhouse women in this category is a testament to the incredible music coming out of Music City,” shares McBryde. “I am honored that Never Will is included among some of my favorite albums in this category. A huge congratulations to all my fellow nominees!” Variety shares of Never Will, “her rowdy and emotionally stirring second album represents the pinnacle of what contemporary mainstream country can be,” while The Wall Street Journal proclaimed of the Arkansas-native, “she’s moved to the forefront of today’s country, and this consistent, exciting and always smart album shows why.” In August, lead single “One Night Standards” marked her first Top 10 hit while going RIAA-Certified Gold in both the United States and Canada after landing on NPR’s “25 Best Songs of 2019,” Rolling Stone’s “25 Best Country and Americana Songs of 2019” and Paste’s “The Best Country Songs of 2020 (So Far).” Earlier this month, McBryde was up for Album of the Year for Never Will at the 2020 CMA Awards, along with a nomination for Female Vocalist and Music Event of the Year as a guest on Miranda Lambert’s “Fooled Around and Fell In Love.” McBryde “delivered an immaculate version of the no-strings-needed ballad,” Billboard praised of her special performance of “One Night Standards.” Never Will is available everywhere now. Never Will Track Listing: Hang In There Girl (Ashley McBryde, Jeremy Bussey) One Night Standards (Ashley McBryde, Nicolette Hayford, Shane McAnally) Shut Up Sheila (Nicolette Hayford, Charles Chisholm) First Thing I Reach For (Ashley McBryde, Randall Clay, Mick Holland) Voodoo Doll (Ashley McBryde, Nicolette Hayford, Brandy Clark, Connie Harrington, Jake Mitchell, Aaron Raitiere) Sparrow (Ashley McBryde, Nicolette Hayford, Brandy Clark, Connie Harrington, Jake Mitchell, Aaron Raitiere) Martha Divine (Ashley McBryde, Jeremy Spillman) Velvet Red (Ashley McBryde, Patrick Savage, Daniel Smalley) Stone (Ashley McBryde, Nicolette Hayford) Never Will (Ashley McBryde, Chris Harris, Blue Foley, Matt Helmkamp, Christian Sancho, Victor Quinn Hill) Styrofoam (Randall Clay) About Ashley McBryde Ashley McBryde learned how to sing sad songs in a biker bar off a rural Arkansas highway–– and it shows. Her 2018 major label debut Girl Going Nowhere (Warner Music Nashville) charmed the New York Times, NPR, Rolling Stone, Paste, The Washington Post, and more, all en route to landing a GRAMMY nomination for Best Country Album. McBryde closed out 2019 with ACM New Female Artist, CMT Breakout Artist of the Year, a New Artist of the Year win at the 53rd Annual CMA Awards and two nominations for the 2020 GRAMMYs for Best Country Song and Best Country Solo Performance for “Girl Goin’ Nowhere.” Her follow-up Never Will, released April 3, was tagged by Rolling Stone as one of the most anticipated of the year alongside NPR, who also ranked her lead Top 10 RIAA Gold-Certified single “One Night Standards” as one of the best songs of 2019. Produced once again by Jay Joyce, Never Will reveals the witty, confessional, detail-driven songwriting addressing a wide spectrum of blue-collar Southern women’s experience introduced on Girl Going Nowhere is still here, but perhaps even sharper, earning McBryde a 2020 CMA nomination for Album of the Year. The music itself is stadium-ready rock-and-roll with a bluegrass wink or two and country music’s storytelling heart––and McBryde, no longer new, is the music’s ordained and highly capable standard bearer. At the 2020 ACM Awards, McBryde gained a winning nod for Musical Event of the Year as a guest on Miranda Lambert’s “Fooled Around and Fell In Love.” For more information, visit AshleyMcBryde.com or follow her at Facebook.com/AshleyMcBryde, Instagram @AshleyMcBryde and Twitter at @AshleyMcBryde. ### Media Contacts for Ashley McBryde Ebie McFarland Essential Broadcast Media ebie@ebmediapr.com 615-327-3259 Wes Vause | Mary Catherine Rebrovick Warner Music Nashville Wes.vause@wmg.com | marycatherine@wmg.com 615-214-1407 Mary Moyer Q Prime mary@qprime.com 212-302-9790 ARTIST BIO “I hear the crowd, I look around, and I can’t find one empty chair. Not bad for a girl going nowhere” sings Ashley McBryde on “Girl Goin’ Nowhere,” the seminal title track from her forthcoming LP. They’re words built from experience: over the course of her life, growing up in Arkansas, McBryde’s been finding her own way to fill those seats and sway those hearts since the very first time her teacher told her that her dreams of writing songs in Nashville would never see the light of day. Every time she was brought down, she persevered; trusting her timeless tone and keen, unwavering eye for the truth. It paid off. In April, Eric Church brought her on stage and called her a “whiskey-drinking badass,” confessing that he’s a massive fan. The rest of the world is quickly catching on, Dubbed as one of Rolling Stone’s “Artists You Need To Know,” citing she’s “an Arkansas red-clay badass, with the swagger of Hank Jr. and the songwriting of Miranda Lambert,” McBryde fearlessly lays it all on the line, and it’s that honest all-in approach that has led to NPR critic Ann Powers to ask if McBryde could be “among the first post-Stapleton country stars?” McBryde’s album will showcase an artistic vision that will prove her to be one of the genre’s keenest working storytellers, bringing unwavering honesty back into a pop-preoccupied genre. Pulling tales from every corner of her human experience – a happenstance love on “A Little Dive Bar In Dahlonega,” a neighbor with a heavy past on “Livin’ Next to LeRoy,” a girl with an impossibly possible dream on “Girl Goin’ Nowhere” – McBryde sings with fire and fury, laughing and swigging that brown stuff along the way. And she’s not going to do it in glitter and sequins, either, like a good lady of Music Row. McBryde will wear her boots and crack her jokes: with McBryde, what you see is what you get, and what you get is what you see. It’s that authenticity bleeding through every lyric, riff and song that had McBryde’s name as the top trending item on Apple Music All Genre upon release of “A Little Dive Bar In Dahlonega.” It’s those lyrics that hit the heart and gut, like “here’s to the breakups that didn’t break us,” that scored her opening slots Chris Stapleton and Eric Church. McBryde was raised in Mammoth Spring, Arkansas, taking to music at the age when most kids were running wild in the backyard, dressing dolls or playing with trains. At three, she’d secretly pluck her father’s guitar like an upright bass, and after about the 17th time being caught, her father bought her a guitar of her own. When she was twelve, she played her parents and grandparents her very first composition. “It was about this awful torrid love affair,” says McBryde, laughing. “My mom was like, ‘oh shit. You are a twelve going on forty.’ At twelve I knew that I could make stuff up. At sixteen I was like, I’m getting good at this. By the time I got to college, I had a big catalogue for an eighteen-year-old.” It was at Arkansas State when, while a member of the marching band, McBryde finally started sharing her voice with others – first at karaoke parties, then in a band, and then in Memphis where she’d play a mix of cover and original songs while still commuting from college. When McBryde finally moved to Nashville in 2007, she settled with a friend at an apartment in a building that housed storage units – not the most glamorous of homes, but enough of a place to crash in between a healthy dose of dive bars, biker hangouts, and colorful joints where she fought to have her songs heard. Her first EP, the self-released 2016 Jalopies and Expensive Guitars was just a taste of what McBryde can do, and, on her full-length debut, she will meld her songwriting chops with the vision of producer Jay Joyce, peppering her tales with a touch of guitar-driven rock fury – but offering plenty of room for her emotive, vulnerable twang to move softly through songs like “Girl Goin’ Nowhere,” which was written the morning that Guy Clark passed away. “I’m not a pretty crier, and I got to my write with Jeremy Bussey that morning, red and blotchy,” she says. “So he said, ‘for Guy, maybe we should write a good song, one you’d want to play at the Opry someday.’ So, I told the story of when I was back in Algebra class, and we were going around the room saying what we wanted to do when we grew up. When it got to me, I said, ‘I’m going to move to Nashville and write songs, and they’re going to be on the radio.’ The teacher looked at me and said, ‘that won’t happen and you better have a good backup plan.’ It didn’t put the fire out, it just added to it.” That fire’s been described as a combination of Bonnie Raitt, Lzzy Hale and Loretta Lynn, and that’s not wrong: McBryde isn’t afraid to tell the truth, get raw and real and use the spirits of country, folk and rock when it serves her greater purpose. And McBryde indeed played “Girl Goin’ Nowhere” at her Opry debut, and still performs it on stage to crowds that now sing along. She gets emotional from time to time, remembering the days when she was working at a guitar shop or as a security guard or selling barbecue, never letting that vision go – a vision she will share on her forthcoming LP that will help remind Nashville what country music is about. And that’s the stories that shake us, make us and tell us a little more about what it’s like to be human. And that girl goin’ nowhere, from a little town in Arkansas? She’s a whiskey-drinking badass, going everywhere. Just watch. CONTACTS PUBLICITY - USA PUBLICITY - UK PUBLICITY - INTERNATIONAL BOOKING - USA PHOTOS PHOTO BY: Katie Kauss PHOTO BY: Daniel Meigs PHOTO BY: Alysse Gafkjen PHOTO BY: Daniel Meigs ALBUM ARTWORK VIDEOS © Q Prime Management 2021. All Rights Reserved. Site by FADE AGENCY.