Ashley McBryde’s “What If We Don’t”: Story Behind the Song
The previous is useless.
That self-help mantra is a good reminder to not let previous regrets maintain us again. But it is sophisticated by an previous William Faulkner quote: “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.”
Several chunks of Ashley McBryde‘s previous are unearthed in her newest single, “What If We Don’t,” a music that pulls on her pre-stardom work and previous relationships, accompanied by a video rooted in a tough story from her youth. McBryde has used an intense type of remedy, eye motion desensitization and reprocessing (EMDR), to heal that high-school episode, which concerned the demise of a detailed good friend in a automobile accident. She nonetheless sheds tears speaking about that good friend — and about one among the music’s co-writers, who additionally died in 2018.
“Writing and releasing this song now is how I’ve processed it the best,” McBryde notes.
“What If We Don’t” was penned on July 8, 2015, by the self-described “Music Row Freaks,” the cowriting trio of McBryde, Terri Jo Box and Randall Clay, round a steel patio desk with an umbrella on the brick-and-mortar again porch at a duplex that Box rented at the time in Nashville’s toney Belle Meade district.
“We definitely brought the neighborhood down with our red necks,” Box says with amusing.
On that individual day, McBryde introduced on her arrival that she wanted a “big rock-ballad chorus,” Box remembers. It was a acutely aware effort by McBryde to search out her lane in nation music at a time when that rough-edged lane wasn’t acknowledged.
“I love the things that were represented sonically at the time,” she says, “but I didn’t have my Pat Benatar that I could turn to.”
They had that sound in thoughts as they addressed the frustrations that each McBryde and Box had been experiencing of their love lives, the place they tended to become involved with pals who turned out to be less-than-ideal companions. “Ashley and I were both in situations, which we both pretty much stayed in back then,” Box says.
They wrote an influence refrain first, sculpting it to McBryde’s formidable vary, with a lyric that contemplated two folks turning a friendship into one thing extra. When they wrote the most subdued verses, they arrange the state of affairs in the opening body by picturing two folks calling it an evening, about to go their separate methods. And in verse two, they thought of the outcomes: “things gettin’ weird if it don’t work out.”
“I remember asking her and Randall, ‘Is it weird to say “weird” in a music?’” Box remembers. “Ashley was like, ‘I love it. Let’s just say it, because that’s what it is: weird.'” In the huge image, “What If We Don’t” is all about crossroads.
“That moment of making the decision to take the risk or not take the risk,” says McBryde, “is immediately followed up by, ‘Wow, I get to live with these consequences,’ no matter what they are.”
McBryde first recorded “What If We Don’t” for her 2016 indie album Jalopies & Expensive Guitars. The music did not come out fairly the approach she imagined it, and it by no means obtained any vital publicity.
Subsequently, Clay died in October 2018 from pneumonia in Pensacola, Fla., as a hurricane descended upon the metropolis. McBryde all the time harbored regrets that “What If We Don’t” had not obtained the absolute best alternative, and as she ready for her subsequent album, she started inserting it into her stay set, working it up together with her highway band, Deadhorse.
“We were out in support of Cody Johnson, so we were trying out new arrangements of a song that has been around a long time in front of 20,000 people a night,” she says. “What a great barometer to go, ‘Well, that worked’ or ‘Well, that didn’t work.’” She enlisted Brothers Osborne guitarist John Osborne to supply the subsequent album, and he appreciated the work they’d already put in earlier than they set foot in his Pinebox Studio on March 6, 2025.
“They really do their homework, and they come in with arrangements,” he says. “I love that, because I can focus on the nitty gritty from the word go.” Box attended the session and was impressed with how deep he went into that nitty gritty.
“John Osborne could go around to every instrument and show what he wanted to hear,” she says. “He could get behind the drums, and then he played the guitar, and he [was] just cool and laid back about everything. “He really let Ashley be Ashley.”
McBryde sang stay with Deadhorse on each take, understanding that any nuance would possibly unlock one thing new in the band. While drummer Quinn Hill is behind them in stay settings, the musicians had been capable of make him the visible focus in the studio.
“I’m watching Quinn play drums like he’s digging a ditch,” McBryde says, “and I’m watching Caleb Hooper’s hair fall into his face — he can’t even see his bass — and it doesn’t matter; his fingers are just flying all over it. And [guitarist] Matt Helmkamp over here ripping solos as though it’s as easy as carrying a bag of chips.”
They handled “What If We Don’t” like a Eighties energy ballad, permitting McBryde to tackle a Joan Jett/Heart/Pat Benatar persona. “There isn’t a production big enough that she can’t absolutely compete with ease,” Osborne says, “so I went really hard with it, and she was all about it.”
When the band had the framework in place, Osborne overdubbed further instrumentation, offering some additional guitar components and thickening the sound with mini-Moog bass and a mellotron that laid synth tones beneath a lot of the manufacturing.
“In the bridge, I put in some really cool pizzicato stabs,” he says. “I grew up playing classical music, and I didn’t appreciate it when I was younger, but as an adult, I love listening to classical music, so I love using sometimes classical rhythms and counterpoints and approaches to sections to create energy.”
Everyone on the crew agreed that “What If We Don’t” must be the subsequent single, which reaffirms the friendship with Clay. “We feel him around all the time,” Box says. “It barely feels like he’s not here for it.”
The accompanying video is constructed roughly round the lack of McBryde’s highschool good friend, and it is notable that the woman has a boyfriend however expresses some sexual stress with McBryde’s character.
“That’s definitely by design, to leave that up to the viewer who the young person is most interested in because at that time, especially at that age group, you’re not sure,” she says. “A lot of the times you’re like, ‘Oh my gosh, I really enjoy hanging out with these two, and I can’t tell exactly.’”
Warner Records Nashville launched “What If We Don’t” to nation radio by way of PlayMPE on Jan. 22, assigning an official add date of Feb. 23.
It builds on a number of completely different friendships, incorporates the more durable edge McBryde all the time envisioned for it, and permits her to pour herself into some robust feelings in a approach that formal remedy by no means fairly offered as she heals her previous.
“I may have had a heartache or two when I wrote it,” she says, “but I didn’t have the tools to fully process everything that I was packing into that until now.”
