While performing at the Grand Ole Opry a little over a year ago, current five-time CMA nominee and two-time winner Ashley McBryde shared with the audience, “I dream about joining the Opry and what that day will be like — Will I cry the entire time? Will I be seated? Who will ask me? I dream about that more than I dream about my wedding.” No longer dreaming about the special day, the Arkansas native has officially been invited to be the newest member of the revered Country institution by Garth Brooks on CBS Mornings. Watch the clip HERE.
“It would be the great joy and the great honor of my life,” McBryde answered through joyful tears. “There’s the GRAMMYs and there’s being a member of the Grand Ole Opry – they are the two greatest things that can happen to you as an entertainer. I’ve always said I will earn it, and this is a pretty surreal moment.”
On the heels of the release of critically acclaimed Ashley McBryde Presents: Lindeville, McBryde took to NBC’s Late Night with Seth Meyers last night, Oct. 5, to perform the Outsider-dubbed “perfect introduction to McBryde’s wild little town,” “Brenda Put Your Bra On,” joined by album collaborator Pillbox Patti. Watch the performance HERE.
Cited by NPR as a “glorious detour into downhome character studies,” the four-time GRAMMY nominee and her collaborators leaned all the way in on Ashley McBryde Presents: Lindeville, garnering applause from critics upon its debut.
Produced by John Osborne, Ashley McBryde Presents: Lindeville includes performances from McBryde, Brothers Osborne, Brandy Clark, Aaron Raitiere, Patti, Caylee Hammack and Benjy Davis, with Rolling Stone calling it a “wildly inventive” album “about a group of people all living in a little town just trying to get by,” as Billboard observes, “While the songs do center on life in a small town, the stories and characters in Lindeville dispel the idyllic nostalgia that permeates many songs currently staking their claims on the country charts.”
“McBryde and crew created detail-rich storylines with a John Prine level of empathy and compassion,” praises AP, while Variety notes, “The very existence of an album like Ashley McBryde Presents: Lindeville is enough to restore your faith in Nashville, however far afield it might have wandered,” making it “Country music’s most ambitious and oddball album in recent memory,” observes Esquire.
Celebrated by The New York Times as “a skilled curator, as well as a performer,” McBryde “has made abundantly clear over the course of her short but fruitful career, she is principally interested in peeling back the layers and speaking the truth,” boasts Vulture.
Summed up by Stereogum, “There’s a whole lot of beautiful writerly vision at work on Lindeville, but it wouldn’t matter if the songs weren’t great. Guess what? The songs are great… A lot of people put a lot of work into this record, and they made something that resonates on a deep, emotional level. Give it up for them.”
“When it comes out,” McBryde shared with Esquire, “I hope everybody laughs a little bit and I hope everybody says ‘What the f*ck?’ a little bit. Sometimes you look and realize, this town is such a mess, everybody here is a disaster. And in the same breath, in that same three minutes, everybody’s okay. And I love those times. Sometimes I wish I could make that stand still a little bit longer—we’re all a disaster, and it’s beautiful. And that’s true whether it’s a small town or a big city.”
