This is why Carly Pearce is the CMA Female Vocalist of the Year.
I know we’ve said it plenty, but it really can’t be repeated enough how incredible her latest album 29: Written in Stone really is.
After going through a highly public divorce in 2020 (in the middle of all the other shit that was going on in the world), Carly turned her heartbreak and her “fairytale that went wrong” into a raw, deeply personal masterpiece with all ups and downs of a relationship that wasn’t meant to be.
Or put even more simply: It’s just really damn good.
The title track to the album, “29,” talks about all those highs and lows and dealing with life when it knocks you down in ways that you don’t expect:
“’Cause for me, twenty-nine
Is the year that I got married and divorced
I held on for dear life, but I still fell off the horse
From a Miss to a Mrs, then the other way around
The year I was gonna live it up
Now I’m never gonna live it down”
Written by Carly, along with Shane McAnally and Josh Osborne, it’s an incredibly personal song yet one that I think just about anybody can relate to. We all have times in our life when things just don’t go like we had hoped – when one minute you’re making plans for your life and next minute the world knocks you on your ass and leaves you wondering what else could possibly be waiting around the corner.
Carly took the stage last night on NBC’s The Voice to perform “29,” and it seems like at least one judge was especially moved by the song.
After Carly’s incredible performance, Kelly Clarkson could be seen wiping tears from her eyes as she stood to cheer on Carly.
And maybe it makes sense that the song would speak to Clarkson, somebody who also went through a bitter and public divorce last year when she split up from her husband Brandon Blackstock.
But I don’t think that you have to have gone through a divorce to understand what Carly’s trying to say in the song.
That’s the beauty of the entire album: Carly dug into her own personal struggles, and yet she came up with an album that everybody can relate to.
That’s the sign of a superstar right there – and everybody saw that on The Voice last night too.
