Ashley McBryde is already deep into the creative process for her fifth album, and it’s already showing signs of pulling from all corners of her musical toolkit.
While backstage at Country Thunder Florida in Tampa, the powerhouse singer-songwriter caught up with Country Now to talk about the fresh batch of music she’s working on, and how this creative process has looked a bit different than past projects.
“So much new music,” she said with excitement. “And there are so many ways to make a record and you can write songs for three or four years and keep ’em all in a basket or on a thumb drive, and then hope that the ones that you liked when you wrote ’em still pique your interest when you make the record. And that’s worked well for us in the past,” she explained.
Writing a Slew of New Songs
One of the first songs to land a slot on her next record was the current fan-favorite, “Ain’t Enough Cowboy Songs.” McBryde shared that the song was written, cut and released all in a short period of time and the result was so positive that she wanted to continue that same approach with her next set of songs.
“We get together at my house in my garage. I’m 41 years old, I still have a garage band,” she said with a smile. “You are responsible for bringing your instrument, your amplification, your microphone, your voice amplification. The mix is your responsibility to play into the room, get in where you fit in, and then we take songs and play ’em classic country style, blues style, whatever you can think of, just to start feeling out what the songs do.”
This method has left them with so many tunes that McBryde now refers to them as “buckets of songs.” With each of these figurative buckets, she plans to “go shopping: and hand-pick songs from each one to include on the album. This will give the project a wide-variety of sounds for fans to enjoy.
“You want traditional country? We have that. It’s like the guy used to see with the jacket, with the watches. ‘You want gold watches? I got gold. You want silver watches?’ We have so many buckets that I think making record five, we’re just kind of going to put a basket on our arm and go shopping,” she explained. “We’ll have one of these, we’ll have one of these and we’re cutting it in real time.”
The Story Behind “Ain’t Enough Cowboy Songs”
Although the project is still in the works, fans have gotten an early preview with “Ain’t Enough Cowboy Songs.” This traditional country ode aims to celebrate the spirit of the west while tapping into a feeling that something is missing and expressing a longing to find a purpose and connection in an ever-changing world.
Written by McBryde with Chris Harris and Patrick Savage and produced by John Osborne, the tune has earned rave reviews from and has now become a highly-anticipated moment in McBryde’s shows.
Opening up about how the song came to be, the Arkansas native said, “So we tend to lean on the rock side of things and it’s just part of what’s in us and we love that. But Chris and our friend Patrick and myself, we sat in a room and we were all kind of, maybe grumpy is a good word. You don’t really know what kind of song is going to come out of that. Well, Chris had his mandolin out and he was like, ‘well, whatever we write, I just know there ain’t enough cowboy songs.’ And we were all like, ‘obviously that’s what we’re writing.’”
@countrynow.com @Ashley McBryde said it right – “There Ain’t Enough Cowboys Songs” 🤠 @Country Thunder #ashleymcbryde #countrythunder #country #festival ♬ original sound – CountryNow.com
This simple thought turned out to be the cure for their grumpiness because the group was able to come together and reflect on their shared appreciation for the kind of records that made them want to make music in the first place.
“They don’t make records like that anymore. It’s up to us to do that. The people that made us want to write songs, nobody writes songs like those anymore. It’s up to us to do that. So we wrote cowboy songs…So we started playing it live to see if it would fly and it flew and it became our highest streaming song to date.”
Ashley McBryde’s appearance at Country Thunder Florida followed a run of opening dates with Cody Johnson at the start of 2025. Throughout the summer, she will hit the stage at even more festivals as well as various headline dates.
The post Ashley McBryde Talks ‘Ain’t Enough Cowboy Songs’ And The Creative Journey Behind Her Next Album [Exclusive] appeared first on Country Now.