Ashley McBryde’s – After Ashley McBryde fell off a horse in 2021 in Montana and suffered a concussion and stitches, she says the scare pushed her toward recording songs she’d been sitting on. Her new album, “Wild,” collects tracks she wrote over the years but never released, bui
A few seconds is all it takes. A horse shifts, the ground rushes up, and suddenly you’re not thinking about lyrics—you’re thinking about whether you’ll walk back into your life.
Ashley McBryde knows that moment too well.
“I was really, really badly hurt,” she told The Associated Press, recalling a fall in 2021 while riding in Montana. “That’s not a figure of speech, sadly.”
The accident was severe enough that she ended up in an emergency room. She suffered a concussion and needed stitches to her scalp, and at the time she couldn’t walk without assistance.
For McBryde, the injury didn’t just threaten her health. It forced a reckoning with the songs she and her band tore through on stage but had never committed to record.
In the years since. she kept coming back to the same fear: what if she kept postponing those tracks—and then something happened that meant “somebody never hears” them. She pointed to specific songs she had written but hadn’t released yet. including “Water in the River. ” “Rattlesnake Preacher. ” and “Creosote.”.
That question became the foundation for “Wild,” her new album.
Produced by John Osborne and recorded with her live band Deadhorse, the record gathers songs McBryde wrote over the years but never released. It’s both a response to time and a way of making sure the material she and her band already championed in concert didn’t stay trapped in the moment.
Before “Wild” took shape, the live tracks that would become its core were, in her words, barn burners—rowdy, high-energy, built for the kind of crowd reaction that makes a performance feel bigger than the room. McBryde says she wanted to balance that spark with something new on record.
So she leaned into experimentation. She pursued divination practices like reading runes and going to a tarot reader, “doing anything and everything” she could to have her fifth album reveal itself. But the answer, she said, came through the way they worked.
She described a “playful, curious” writing process with her band, and after looking closely at the songs they felt like playing well, she realized they were true stories about her life.
“It’s terrifying to be known,” she said.
Still, she found something freeing in it. “It’s also cathartic,” McBryde said, adding that the experience wasn’t unique to her. “Whatever it was that I was going through, I’m not unique. There’s nothing I’ve been through that most of us haven’t been through or are going to go through. ” she said. “It’s not about me, it’s about us.”.
McBryde’s new release arrives after 2023’s “The Devil I Know,” an album she says carried a rebellious streak. When critics suggested she was too rock, she said the band turned it up. When critics said something was too country. she said they put “a toothpick in its mouth.” By the time she reached “Wild. ” she said she stopped worrying about what people expected.
“It’s none of my business. My job is to make sure these songs get heard,” she said.
Sonically, she calls the album her most rock ‘n’ roll. She points to the opening stretch, describing it as closer to what appears on the first four tracks. Emotionally. “Wild” carries her fiery spirit across themes that include the cutting treatise on domesticity “Lines in the Carpet. ” the title track as a kind of heartfelt mission statement. and the songs between them.
On the title track, she sings: “Does the wild call out to you from a distance?” Then she follows with the idea that gets to the heart of the album’s urgency: “Do you miss the fire and the freedom? / When there wasn’t anything keeping / You from being wild.”
John Osborne praised the partnership in a press statement, saying, “Never settling. Always reaching. The perfect combination of vulnerable and fearless.”
For McBryde, the album’s backstory doesn’t just live in interviews—it lives in the decision to stop waiting. After a fall that sent her to an emergency room and left her with a concussion and stitches, she said she couldn’t shake the thought of what might be lost if she didn’t press forward.
“Wild” is what she made sure wouldn’t be lost.
Ashley McBryde Wild album horse fall concussion Montana Deadhorse John Osborne country music tarot runes