Ashley McBryde Opens up About Loss of Brother on New Album

Ashley McBryde tragically lost her brother, Clay McBryde, almost one year ago. Although his death is still extremely painful for her, McBryde chose to bravely share her sorrow in a song on her upcoming sophomore album.

"Songwriting is very therapeutic for me," McBryde recently shared with PopCulture.com and other media, adding that she wasn't afraid to delve into the painful topic.

"It doesn't have to be scary just because it's sad," said the singer. "I didn't expect it to make the record, and I knew when we wrote it – I started to tear up. We were talking back and forth, smoking cigarettes. I laughed, and I'm like, 'Oh my god, I sound like Clay when I laugh."

It was that realization that spawned the song, which forced McBryde to be transparent with her emotions.

"Once we smell blood in the water, we go for it," McBryde said. "I think we need that kind of honesty as songwriters. We need to be able to do that for ourselves, and if we feel that way, other people feel that way. And other people might not be able to say the things we can say or in a way we can say, so we owe it to each other to put that kind of honesty out there."

McBryde's upcoming record will follow her freshman Girl Going Nowhere album, with the Arkansas native eager to share even more of who she is, as a person and an artist, with her next set of tunes.

"We left ourselves a lot of room for growth on the first record," maintained McBryde. "We did have a lot of ideas we wanted to try out, and directions we wanted to go, and we didn't want to go in every direction all at once. Especially introducing ourselves on the first record. So now on the second record we have the room to grow, so we took it."

The song about McBryde's brother isn't the only chance she is taking on her sophomore record.

"We have a tendency to be a little edgier than some people would like and so we didn't stray away from it," McBryde hinted. "We have a tendency to write some kind of dark kind of sounding things, but still light hearted. So we kind of went in that direction we weren't afraid of it at all. Its been a really cool process, still with Jay Joyce, and still with my band. We cut it live, all together."

Photo Credit: Getty images / Erika Goldring