If you’re curious about Carter Faith’s mission statement, you’ll hear it on her debut album, Cherry Valley. “I feel things very deeply,” she shares with American Songwriter. “I think that’s why I am a singer-songwriter.” She expresses these deep feelings across the album that gets its name from a real town Faith drove past with friend and collaborator Ashley Monroe while driving to friend Connie Harrington’s lake house, where the trio wrote “Changed,” the album’s first song. “It just spoke to me,” Faith says of the album title. “What would a year in Cherry Valley feel like? You go through the seasons, and that’s how I wanted it to feel. We wrote a song about that experience, and it took on this little world that all my music lived in.”
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Faith introduced the album, released in August, with the lead single “If I Had Never Lost My Mind…” that was the result of a tough breakup after a long relationship. “I feel very connected to that song,” she says of the statement-making track that features striking lyrics like, ‘Cause who wants a girl who’s a little deranged / A little too much and a little too strange? / If I could just change, maybe someone would stay / But I lose my mind every time. “This album definitely sounds like me, but it’s different. I think it’s bold, and I wanted all the singles to feel that way, too. There are different versions of boldness on the album, but that first song [was] coming out of the gates swinging, and that’s what I wanted to do.”
She continues on this theme with “Grudge,” the album’s second single, which was inspired by a rumor mill about the singer in her hometown. Faith went into the writing room with Tofer Brown and Steph Jones with “fresh resentment” toward the person who started the rumors. Faith admits the song was written as a “joke,” but once she started playing it live and saw the audience’s positive reaction to the humorous tone and biting lyrics, she knew she had to release it as a single. “You’re mad, you’re sad, and then you forgive and come out on the other side. I wanted it to have that whole realm of emotion because that’s how I am as a person,” she describes. “As a songwriter, I can’t imagine not writing about my life that’s happening to me. That’s my main form of therapy. I have to write things to get them out of my system.”
When she’s not processing heavy-hitting emotions on Cherry Valley, Faith had the opportunity to work with two of her dream collaborators that span the musical spectrum in 2024, Bon Iver and Alison Krauss. Iver personally selected the up-and-coming country singer to sing background vocals on his song “AWARDS SEASON” after he heard her song, “Greener Pasture.” “It was the craziest experience ever because he’s an iconic artist to me, and to have a whisper of my voice on there, I’m honored,” she says. Faith also managed to get country legend Krauss on “Blue Bird” from her 2024 EP, The Aftermath, Faith calling the opportunity to work with both artists “very surreal.”
[RELATED: Carter Faith’s ‘Cherry Valley’ Is Bold Country Storytelling]
The North Carolina native continues to live her dreams, serving as a supporting act on Carly Pearce’s tour during the first half of 2025 and spending the latter half of the year on the road with Little Big Town. In addition to getting to perform with Pearce each night, the 2021 CMA Female Vocalist of the Year imparted valuable advice to Faith. “Be a convicted person,” Faith says of Pearce’s words. “I think that’s what you have to do to be a successful artist and to connect with people is have conviction in who you are and be confident in that.”
Faith applies that conviction to Cherry Valley as she sonically colors outside the lines of modern-day country music with the album’s country-meets-Beach Boys vibe. Yet lyrically, she continues to stay on brand with her honest songwriting that packs a punch while taking fans inside her heart. “I think there’s something in my voice that feels honest,” she says. “That’s what I hope is the feeling in my voice and the lyrics [connecting] with them,” Faith says of the way her storytelling and songwriting resonate with fans.
“I learned that I have to be confident in what I love and who I am as a songwriter and an artist, and that was a really eye-opening process for me,” she says. “I wanted it to be this wide range of complex emotions that don’t make sense together because that is the confusing part of life that’s real. I think people will learn that I’m soft and hardcore. I’m angry and forgiving. It can be both. I’m just a real person who is having these feelings.”
Photos by Bree Fish
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