Carly Pearce has always been full of hope for a better future, even though the songs in her latest project 29 are mostly sad and depressing since they highlight her struggles being married and divorced within a year and losing her friend and producer Busbee, but she hopes the new chapter of her life and songs will be happy.
Fans are thinking this time might be the tipping point for her when she shared a picture of herself with former MLB player Riley King, but the country star is not ready to admit anything. “I’m happy,” what more can we want for the two-time ACM award winner.
Carly Pearce on Moving Forward with Her Life and Music Career after Divorce
The country star, 31, gave an interview on her growing career and the milestones she achieved with her chart-topping EP 29 that detailed the last year of her 20s. She also touched on her love life after divorcing from her ex-husband and fellow country star Michael Ray in less than a year of marriage, with their divorce finalized in September 2020.
Carly Pearce recently shared a selfie of herself cozying up to Riley King, former MLB player, on her Instagram Story. When fans pried into the status of her rumored romance, she dodged the question, instead choosing to share, “All I will say is I’m happy. I’ll tell you, I’m very happy about that.”
Amid the turmoil of her breakup, Carly Pearce penned several songs for the year that saw “her married and divorced”, but she says that she’s not a “once-bitten twice-shy” kind of girl and she still very much believes in love stories. “I believe in love. I want to find love. I got married because I was in love. I mean, that’s the whole thing. I absolutely will never let a failed relationship keep me from finding that love that I deserve,” she explains.
Carly Pearce loves to write songs about the things that are deeply emotional and meaningful to her during a particular time of her life. Her song “Show Me Around” is a homage to her close friend and record producer Michael James Ryan, popularly known as Busbee, who died at age 43 from brain cancer.
“I’m such a situational writer,” the “What’s Next” singer says, saying that getting to slow down due to the pandemic allowed her to examine how she feels about her life. “Thankfully I now see the good of quarantine. For me, it was kind of a time to shut down, really take care of myself, take care of my heart, focus on music and focus on what I wanted to say. If you look at the people that co-wrote the songs with me, they’re my close friends and I trusted them. It was kind of like therapy for me. And I really do feel like I was able to understand song by song, how I was feeling.”
Pearce Reflects on How Writing Songs Helped Her Cope with the Stress of a Divorce
“I got married to stay married and to only get married once. I think that never in a million years, if you would have told me that this was going to be my story, that it would be that, but unfortunately it was,” Pearce reflects.
Also adding: “I have found — because I decided to go there in this music — a lot of other people’s lives, maybe not divorced but some especially young, nobody wants to talk about divorce in your 20s. Nobody wants to talk about just the bad things that maybe people think, ‘Oh well, that’s not going to happen to me,'” she says.
Pearce also spoke on her 2019 wedding to fellow country singer Michael Ray and how wrong it felt to have it end. “I just got married and it looked like a fairytale, but because I decided to share my truth, it felt like other people now are feeling like they can too and they have somebody. We all have faces in the public eye for a reason and you know for music, but now I’m putting a face to something that a lot of people hold shame around.”
“Whatever I record next, I hope that people can hear, ‘Oh my goodness when you go through hard things, there’s good that’s going to come out of it and you’re going to understand parts of you that you never even knew were there.’ I just think you’re going to hear a really happy and content and stronger person,” Pearce says.
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