Carly Pearce Marks Renewal, Humor and Healing on ‘hummingbird’—“I Will Say That I’m Very Optimistic About Love”

Carly Pearce always knew she’d be here. The CMA-, ACM-, CMT-, and Grammy Award-winning artist was sure of it—as a kid, then as a teenager, and even when things weren’t going so well as a young adult. She knew she would be a country music star, and that truth has continued to be her driving force—through heartbreak, divorce, unglamorous working conditions, and all of life’s other ups and downs.

The throughline throughout her entire life has been country music. It’s the genre her grandparents exposed her to at a young age. It’s the music she listened to while she cleaned houses for Airbnb. And it was the one thing that got her through those quiet moments of doubt that she might never make it. And more recently, it’s the art form she turned to in order to survive a devastating public breakup.

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Now Pearce has released her latest album, hummingbird, and it’s one that marks renewal, humor, and healing. “I will say that I’m very optimistic about love,” Pearce tells American Songwriter, “and I know that it will be a part of my story when it’s supposed to be. But it’s not that I’m scorned. I almost feel like this album is more like, ‘I’m OK, we’re OK.’ We can poke fun. We can laugh. We’re all good. There are tongue-in-cheek moments, but I’m still very optimistic.”

Optimistic, yes. But also certain. Few people ever know what their destiny is. But Pearce has always had a sense of clarity that way. Considering her 34 years on Earth, Pearce says she feels her whole life was leading her to where she is now. The only goal she’s ever had, from when she was in grade school to when she moved to Nashville some 15 years ago to now, was to get better as a songwriter and performer and make it in the country music world.

Now, that goal has been even more refined. Not only does she want to write and play the music for herself, but she wants to put out songs that impact her audience in profound ways. For someone who’s wanted to make it since her teenage years, it’s a mature thought.

“Of course I thought that it was taking too long for me to get successful,” she says with a laugh, “but I’m so grateful for the time that I had to work behind the scenes and try to figure out exactly who I wanted to be.”

Pearce says she doesn’t remember a time when she didn’t want to be a country music artist. That reality, though, is nuanced. It can be scary, she says, knowing what you want. Buoying, yes. But what if it doesn’t happen for you? Then, it can start feeling like a curse.

Thankfully for her, she ultimately didn’t have to live that defeated reality. The Kentucky-born Pearce had supportive parents, including a mother who moved with her to Pigeon Forge, Tennessee, so the teenager could take a job singing at Dollywood, the theme park owned by country legend Dolly Parton. “For me,” she says, “I just had this wide-eyed optimism about me as a kid that was just like, ‘Of course I can do this!’”

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While singing at the park, Pearce also found a home-schooling program that could help get her into college if her No. 1 plan ever fell through. She was the youngest person in her work environment by at least five years, though, and that experience helped her jump into the Nashville world by age 19. “I just felt ready to go, full steam ahead,” she says.

Pearce remains grateful for the sacrifice her parents made so she could take these steps forward. And it all paid off, of course—perhaps most poignantly on the day when Parton, herself, invited Pearce into the Grand Ole Opry a few years ago. Parton, who Pearce calls one of the “queens of country music,” totally surprised the “Next Girl” singer with the invite. And it floored her.

“I love having ACMs, I love having CMAs, I love having a Grammy,” Pearce says. “But to me, the most important and highest honor I will ever have as a country music artist is being a member of the Opry. To have it done by just this absolute legend was the most full-circle moment. She knew that I had worked at Dollywood. That will forever be one of the greatest moments of my life.”

Days like that can reshape the past. Like back when Pearce worked cleaning houses. “All I’m going to say,” she shares, “is that the hairs that you find in beds and on toilets that you don’t know where they’re coming from is disgusting!”

But she remembers another moment, too, from before the cleaning gig. In her early 20s, she’d been given a developmental record deal with Sony. The label gave her songs to choose from to—perhaps—cut for a record. But she was released from the deal when the A&R person she’d been working with at the label was let go.

That’s what led her to the Airbnb job. One day, while cleaning, she was listening to a Pandora station, and one of the songs Sony had given her to consider started playing. It was Danielle Bradbery who was singing it.

“It was this super-low moment of, ‘Oh my God, how is this happening to me?’” Pearce says. “But it also became the fuel that I think reinvigorated me to be like, ‘You know what? I can do this; I’m going to do this. This is not the end of my story.’”

It was a massive turning point for her. “I just remember being like, ‘Oh no, this is not the end.’” And she was right, as she has been about so many things in her career over the years. Now, it’s a decade later, and she’s achieved almost every professional dream she’d hoped for as a young person. But it hasn’t been without tough choices. “I think as a woman at 34,” she says, “I’ve sacrificed a lot of things like marriage and children and normalcy and all of these things to achieve this career that I wanted so badly.”

Pearce says she appreciates the journey. With every decision everyone makes, there are questions about the potential for greener grass elsewhere. But Pearce actually followed through with what her mind has always been set on. “It’s a really sweet place to be at 34,” she says, “to be in a place [where] I knew this was my destiny, I knew this was God-given, I knew that I was where I was supposed to be…but it’s been a wild ride.”

To date, Pearce has released four studio records, beginning in 2017 with Every Little Thing and the hit title track that put her on the map. She released a self-titled album in 2020 and then came her major breakout, 29: Written in Stone. That 2021 LP included another hit song, “Next Girl.”

So Carly Pearce is established now. She’s mainstream. She’s known and listened to by millions. She’s also grateful to artists like Kelsea Ballerini and Trisha Yearwood, who helped her plant her flag in the country music dirt simply because they believed in her talent. As a result, Pearce says, she is always on the lookout for other up-and-comers who deserve a fair shot. “I want to pay that forward,” she says.

Another way she is paying it forward is in the songs she writes and releases, especially with the tracks that are imbued with vulnerability. In a way, that’s her superpower: to write honestly and openly about the difficulties she’s been through. Pearce doesn’t shy away from content others might think portrays her in a bad light—namely breakups, divorce (in her case from country singer Michael Ray), and the ugly sides of romantic defeat.

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“I almost feel like it’s my duty to be super-vulnerable,” Pearce says. To wit, she named her album hummingbird because the tiny creature portends good luck and is a “sign of healing.” She didn’t want to write an album that glossed over the bad in favor of a disingenuous feeling of happy-happy-happy. Instead, she wanted to map out the steps it can take to find peace again.

“It’s been a journey to heal, and it’s been a journey just to build myself back up after being completely broken down,” she says. “And I think this body of work symbolizes that country music, yet again, has been the heartbeat of my life. And it’s still where I go. And I’m OK. And that doesn’t mean life is perfect, but it means that I’m OK and I made it out.”

The beauty of her past successes is that Pearce knows people care about what she has to say. She has a license to be herself and tell her story. There is an audience that will both listen and relate. That’s empowering. To that end, she says, every hit she’s ever written has come from an authentic place. She holds onto that truth as her creative blueprint.

Standout songs on the new record include the clever “rock paper scissors,” on which she sings about getting a rock (a ring), signing (marriage) papers, and taking scissors to photos and bedsheets that remind her of her past relationship. “I love a good play on words,” she says. Another is “fault line,” a song about a broken relationship. A third is “we don’t fight anymore,” which features the incredible singer Chris Stapleton and is about a relationship that’s been exhausted and is on the outs.

“This is my favorite album that I’ve made so far, because I feel like there are so many different unique moments on it,” she says. “There’s a confidence in this album—or I guess [an] awareness of love that I don’t feel like 29 had because I was in the depths of it.”

Today, Pearce says she’s in a good place. She has friends and family and loving bandmates all around her. Therapy has helped, too. But most of all, touring has served as a balm. Sharing her songs (and her pain) with fans and seeing them relate and give their energy back to her has been a boon, something irreplicable. No one wants to feel alone or isolated. And when Pearce is with thousands of her fans at a show, she knows she isn’t.

She says that, in a way, she wishes everyone could write an album about their lowest point so they could see the impact it can have on others. “The redemptive part of it where you realize, ‘I was meant to write this album to help other people’…that’s the biggest healing that you could ever have,” she explains.

It’s a lesson she learned recently, and though she’s always been certain of her country music future, she knows she’s grown and changed a lot along the way. She couldn’t have predicted the specifics of her life today, even seven or eight years ago. But there’s beauty in that evolution.

As such, Pearce holds onto her positive outlook on life. She’s open and ready for more music, connection, and whatever a career in country music may bring her. “The future excites me,” she says. She wants to continue to write and share her songs—that’s her mission, her dream, her purpose. Music is the lifeblood of her day, the reason to get up in the morning, and the nectar from which she drinks (to continue the hummingbird metaphor). Indeed, it’s music that’s shaped her unlike anything else in the world.

“It makes you feel something,” Pearce says. “There is a song for every emotion. And there is a feeling that you get [from it], of not feeling alone.”

Photos by Allister Ann