Carly Pearce is gearing up to enter a new chapter in her career. She closed the door on her name-making project, 29: Written in Stone, and opened another punctuated by the release of her song “Country Music Made Me Do It.” While we wait for even more new music from Pearce, check out 15 of her most inspiring quotes below.
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1. “I am just very unapologetically myself. I don’t think I know how to not be honest. I have to tell the whole truth in my lyrics to be able to really stand behind them. I have to really feel it.”
2. “I definitely want to be a country artist. I want to make it very clear that I want to stay in our genre. I dreamt of being a country artist, and I want to continue to be a purist for that.”
3. “Being an independent artist, you have to find creative ways of getting your music to people.”
4. “I hope that the vulnerability I share in my songs and my story is a vessel to people, showing them they are not alone and that anything is possible.”
5. “Heartbreak has so many layers. So many layers that often feel like a rollercoaster ride.”
6. “I would say Alison Krauss was a big influence. Patty Loveless, Trisha Yearwood, Faith Hill. I loved, growing up, female voices with a lot of texture and a lot of character to their voices.”
7. “I’ve been so open about my story, and I think it can show any female that you can do it. I had every single stereotype against me.”
8. “I spent so many years acting as my own booking agent and manager, just to get out there and play shows. You have to show you really want it.”
9. “I grew up loving country music from a young age and wanted to sing more than I wanted to sit in school.”
10. “I loved all kinds of bluegrass music. Sonya Isaacs was a big influence; she’s a bluegrass gospel singer, but she’s also done a lot in the country world from backup and songwriter and as an artist. Also, the Dixie Chicks were a big influence. Just all of those ’90s and early 2000s country voices.”
11. “I had a lot of people that told me, ‘Oh you’re dated, or you’re this or you’re that or you need to be more this,’ and it’s kind of funny that when I stopped listening to all of that and just wrote from a place of truth everything started to fall into place for me.”
12. “It is okay to feel in control one minute and out of control the next. We have to love ourselves fully and give ourselves grace to feel. It is the only way we can truly heal.”
13. “I wish that more women would be vulnerable with other women because none of us on this side of heaven will ever reach perfection. I think that needs to be normalized.”
14. “I feel like I needed to grow up. I needed to grow up as a songwriter. I needed to grow up as a singer, a performer. I needed to grow up as a woman.”
15. “I think as I’ve gotten older I think it was a blessing that I didn’t get a record deal until my late 20s because I think it allowed me to really grow up as Carly not as Carly Pearce.”
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