It’s the price of fame and success, I guess…
Carly Pearce has spoken publicly before about her very short marriage to fellow country artist Michael Ray, and she previously told Bunnie XO that she was the one who “slid into” Michael’s DM’s because she thought he was cute and had heard a lot of good things about him from mutual connections. This was very early in her career, around the time her 2017 song “Every Little Thing” went #1 and became her first commercial success, and Carly admitted that Ray’s career was very much on the up and up, and she was finally just starting to get a little bit of traction.
Carly has confessed that they were both somewhat blinded by the excitement and attention, though she was very clear that she went into it with pure intentions and was getting married “for the right reasons.” She admitted very honestly that she knew the night they got married she “shouldn’t have,” and Carly and Michael were ultimately only married for about eight months in total, from October 2019 until she filed for divorce in June of 2020
And during a recent conversation with David Begnaud on the The Person Who Believed In Me podcast, Carly explained that she knew on the day she got married that she “made a very big mistake,” as did everyone else around her. Yesterday, it got ton of headlines from many different outlets, and really anytime a country star talks about an ex, especially if it’s another famous person, it’s going to make headlines and become a relatively big story. People will be interested in that until the end of time… it just is what it is because people (like me) are nosey.
Carly said:
“You know when you just know something’s not how it should be? I think everybody in my life knew I had made a… he made it very clear that I made a very big mistake.”
She says that Ray had a bit of a “Jekyll and Hyde” personality, but she didn’t see it until it was too late. But, she says she learned a lot about herself, and she learned how strong she really was because she was willing to “blow her life up” when she realized very quickly it wasn’t what she deserved. She admits that she still wonders why Ray wanted to marry her to begin with because she feels that it wasn’t “for real”:
“There’s a bit of Jekyll and Hyde… that I did not see until it was too late. And that’s something I’m grateful for my very short marriage because it taught me a lot about myself. It also gave me the album ’29.’
I think it taught me just how strong I am. I knew very quickly this was not what I deserved, and I blew up my life to get out of it. I didn’t stay because society tells you you should. I was done, and I think the one thing that has always carried with me is, why? Why did he marry me? That’s the one thing that I’ve always wondered, is just, why do it if it wasn’t for real.”
Of course, there are two sides to every story, and Ray has really never said much publicly about his side of what went down, and as we all know, life and love can be incredibly complicated and we’ll never know the full details of everything that transpired. But Carly says it was “apparent” that their relationship was not what she wanted for her life:
“Yes. And it was very apparent for me that this was just not wanted for my life.”
It’s not the first time Carly has spoken publicly about her divorce, and you’ll pretty much always see a story about it if it happens because she was married to someone else in the genre. But Carly wasn’t too pleased about all the headlines yesterday, sharing a post of a screenshot from a People story as an example, calling it “frustrating” that she kept seeing it covered by so many outlets.
She added that it was one of her favorite interviews she’s ever done, and she talked about a lot throughout the episode, but she didn’t appreciate how answering this question “for two minutes” is what ended up making the rounds. She ended it by saying it’s these kinds of things that make media hard for her because she “didn’t ask to talk about this”:
“I have seen this headline everywhere today on different outlets and it’s super frustrating. I literally did one of my favorite interviews of my career chatting about my story and people who have championed me, and I answered one question for two minutes about this topic and this is what gets passed around? This is the part of media that is so hard because I certainly didn’t ask to talk about this.”
To be fair, the podcast page had also posted this specific clip (though it looks like it has since been taken down), because these types of clips are what’s going to get the most attention, and then hopefully convince viewers to check out the entire conversation. It’s how the entire podcast world operates. Every Whiskey Riff Raff podcast gets clipped into 5 or 6 little pieces and shared on social media as a preview to the full conversation. And obviously you don’t want to pull clips out of context or make your guest look bad (which didn’t happen here), but the parts of the conversation that are the most likely to garner attention are the ones that are gonna get clipped… the breaking news, the funny parts, the juiciest drama… it’s the nature of the beast.
It would be nice if people only ever cared about the music, believe me, but that’s really never been the case when it comes to famous musicians. Think about the most iconic musicians of all-time, who were doing this way before social media existed… Michael Jackson, Whitney Houston, Elvis… people were certainly invested in their personal lives as well. For better or worse (worse in my opinion), people are infinitely interesting in their favorite artists personal life, no matter how incredible their music is, and so it’s just part of the job, and you can bet your bottom dollar that if you talk about something as juicy as this publicly, it’s going to become a headline.
I’m not sure if she told them she wasn’t going to talk about it before this specific interview, but it came up either way, and as the artist, you really have two options… decline to to talk about, or talk about it knowing that it’ll be a headline that hopefully leads to fans digging in to the deeper conversation.
Of course, Carly is an incredibly talented artist, we share her music anytime she puts something out, and that includes everything she’s done recently with “You Can Have Him,” “Church Girl” and of course, her duet with Riley Green, “If I Don’t Leave I’m Gonna Stay.” Carly hasn’t officially announced the album yet, but she’s off to a super solid start with all of these singles, and I can’t wait to hear what else she has in the works hopefully sooner rather than later.
I don’t blame her for being frustrated, I’m sure it’s annoying to always have your personal life under scrutiny and I don’t envy her for that, but I guess the lesson in 2026 is, be careful what you say on a podcast… anything you say can and will become a headline.
The full podcast is available below… like she said, it’s a great listen and a neat peek into her story and how she got where she is today.
