Lawd have mercy… this one cuts deep.
I recently stumbled up on a stunning unreleased Ashley McBryde tune called “Learned To Lie,” and it’s one of the most honest, real country songs I’ve heard in a while.
She opens the song with some absolutely heart-wrenching lines, saying that she feels like her mom was lying to herself even before she was born, as her dad was mostly absent from the start, running around with other women “foggin’ up the windows of an ’89 Sable”:
“I traced it back to a couple months before I was born,
Must have heard my momma tellin’ my daddy,
That she was tired, cuz babies make you tired,
But deep down she was just unhappy,
I think my father didn’t ask what he could do,
Rarely made it to the dinner table,
Said he was workin late,
But he was workin late foggin’ up the windows of an 89 Sable”
That’ll hit you right where it hurts…
And during a performance at Nashville’s 3rd and Lindsley venue last year, Ashley shared some of the very personal backstory behind it, adding that she had to brace her mom for how honest and raw it was before she ever played it for a crowd:
“Okay well, I told my mom this song existed before she got to hear it, because I knew, I said, ‘It’s gonna hurt, but none of it’s false.’
She said, ‘Okay, honey.’ And then I was on FaceTime, and I just told her the lyrics, my stepdad’s in the frame too. And I was like, ‘What do you think, poppa?
And he showed my his nipple. His love language is acts of service… this will be in the neighborhood of G.”
That Ashley McBryde is simply the real damn deal.
She has released two singles in the last month or so, her current single at country radio “Light On In The Kitchen” and more recently “The Devil I Know,” so I really hope this one finds its way onto a likely forthcoming (yet still unannounced) album this year…
Do yourself a favor and check it out, especially if you love sad country songs as much as I do:
“Light On In The Kitchen”
“The Devil I Know”
