The premise of two women singing together about being caught loving the same man isn’t a new one for country music: Reba McEntire and Linda Davis explored the idea in 1993 with their duet, “Does He Love You.”
But when Carly Pearce and Ashley McBryde teamed up to write their song, “Never Wanted to Be That Girl,” they immediately knew they wanted to approach the topic in a different way.
“We didn’t want to just try to reboot ‘Does He Love You.’ We didn’t want to try to do anything that had already been done so well,” Ashley explains. “So in this one, these women don’t confront each other…nobody wants to be the other woman, and they’re both finding out at the same time that they are. And they’re just saying, ‘I just never wanted to be this girl.’”
For Carly, the song was an exciting chance to work with a singer with whom she’s long felt a kinship. “I feel like when I’ve performed next to Ashley in writers’ rounds, we sing the same,” she points out.
“She’s a little edgier than me, as far as, she’s got a slight bit of southern rock to her,” Carly goes on to say, “but on the country side, we anticipate each other’s voices in the same way. And I wanted to sing with that.”
Those similar vocal skills translated to the studio: “We’re swapping lines and then swapping who’s singing harmony,” agrees Ashley. “It happened organically in the writing room, so we wanted to make sure it got recorded that way.”
“Never Wanted to Be That Girl” comes off of Carly’s latest album, 29: Written in Stone.
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