October 2026 Digital Cover Story: Carly Pearce is Done Letting Comparison Call the Shots

Within an industry that demands vulnerability, Carly Pearce has built a reputation for embracing it. Pearce is an artist who tells it like it is and sticks to her principles in a way that often recalls the women in country music of bygone eras, in all the best ways. If Loretta Lynn set a fire by addressing double standards and singing about standing your ground, Pearce is one of the women proudly tending those flames today. 

The day we speak, it’s mere weeks after the loss of Dolly Parton, who was integral to so many lives in Nashville, across the country and around the world. Parton was, if indirectly, the force behind Pearce’s first job in music: performing as a singer at Dollywood. She is also the one who invited Pearce to join the Grand Ole Opry. 

Those touchpoints are inseparable from the artist Pearce has become. The evening the news broke of Parton’s passing, Pearce was already scheduled to play the Opry days later. The program, initially designed to celebrate her five-year anniversary as an Opry member and promote her 2026 album, became a gathering among friends to celebrate one of the greatest artists to ever do it.  

“I’m just very grateful for all of the ways that she influenced me throughout my life,” Pearce tells American Songwriter. “ There was this moment at the end of the show where they played a video of her singing ‘I Will Always Love You’ on the Opry stage.  I was the only artist with my feet actually in the circle, and I kept looking down at my feet and then looking up at her, and there was so much I was feeling in that moment. I’ll never forget it.” 

For all of Pearce’s reputation for bracing honesty, there’s something even more unguarded about her energy in the wake of the appropriately titled Honest Woman. She’s chatting with American Songwriter at her kitchen counter, which alone is a total rarity these days. She’s in the home she sings about on the album’s opening track, “Dream Come True,” a brutally bittersweet lead-in to the project where she reveals the reality of how success in the entertainment industry can be prohibitive to many of the more normal parts of life. She opens the album: Bought me a house at the end of a cul-de-sac / Four bedrooms / But I only use one. 

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“I’ve been working on this album for so long—almost two years—and people never know all of the things that go on behind the scenes to get an album out,” she says. “But it feels particularly great to finally have this music out. I really feel in my bones that it’s my best body of work I’ve ever made. We’re finally getting to play some of these songs live, and it’s great.”

This year marks nearly a decade since Pearce released her first single, and she describes how she’s spent that time truly understanding who she is—on the creative level and the personal level.  She’s referred to Honest Woman as the album she feels like she moved to Nashville to make. 

“I think there’s that level of authenticity that comes with the experience of figuring out who you are, and that plays into why I feel like it’s my best music,” she says. “There was this real longing for my heart to feel inspired again in this town. I had a lot of success, and then I had some low moments over the last few years—different things in my own anxious mind and moments of feeling left out that caused me to forget the whole purpose and what I wanted to do when I moved here. At the end of the day, I couldn’t control the likes, the comments, the streams, the ticket sales. The only thing that I could control was the music.”

The result is an album that sees Pearce touch on some of the messiest but truest parts of the human experience, as on tracks like “Happy for Myself,” where she digs into the competing emotions of happiness for a dear friend that coexists alongside sadness or jealousy. 

“Comparison is something we all have, and this story was really important to me because it was a real story of me kind of having this moment of, ‘Oh, no, I think I’m jealous of my friend while I’m trying to be happy for her.’ It’s not that I’m not happy for her, but I’m also like, ‘What the heck? I want this, too.’” That feeling is distilled into one of the central questions of the album: “When do I get to be happy for myself?”

She’s also sharpened her pen over the decade since her first single, allowing her to step into the themes present in songs like “Happy for Myself” and “Dream Come True.” But perhaps more importantly, she’s developed greater confidence in making decisions beyond the music itself.

“I’ve had moments where unexpected songs have hit, and there have been moments where songs that my team told me I absolutely had to cut weren’t hits,” she recalls. “There were times that the song that we all thought was going to be a big hit just wasn’t, so you have to get to a place where you have to do it for your own belief in the music.”

“I say in my shows that I don’t envy the era of what young women are growing up in, where you can pull out your phone and see every single thing that every human being is doing,” she continues. “I feel that pressure, but it’s not how I grew up in those impressionable ages. I’ve always been known for being vulnerable, but I challenged myself with this album to look at my story and my writing and what people knew of me as an onion. And I asked, ‘Okay, what else can I show people?’”

Part of that answer lay in going back even further than she initially expected and immersing herself in the bluegrass music she strongly associates with her youth in Kentucky. She calls the bluegrass moments on Honest Woman, which include collaborations with genre legend Dan Tyminski and Molly Tuttle, the aspect of the album she’s most proud of. 

“I really went back home to the sounds of Kentucky,” she says. “If you know me, you know that I love bluegrass music, but I never fully went that way sonically until now.” 

Her collaboration with Riley Green, “If I Don’t Leave I’m Gonna Stay,” offers another example of Pearce following a song where she hears possibility rather than simply checking a commercial box. The track wasn’t originally written as a duet, but something about it kept nagging at Pearce as full of potential. She sent the song to Green, and within minutes, he replied, echoing the sentiment.  

“When I heard his vocal, I couldn’t get over how great he sounded,” she says. “And of course anyone would be interested in having a collaboration with him, but I’m just a fan, and I’ve been a longtime fan of his. It’s really fun to get to have a song together.”   

Honest Woman makes room to explore the complexities of desire, as Pearce does on her collaboration with Green, while also digging into those vulnerabilities and finding room for humor. Perhaps the best example of Pearce letting loose is on “He Don’t Like My Dogs,” in which her beloved pets raise the first—and arguably most important—red flag about a beau. “They didn’t like him either, and they like everyone,” she sings. If that’s not honest, what is?

Ultimately, the freedom Pearce found in making Honest Woman wasn’t about caring less or making herself smaller. It was about refusing to allow anyone else’s definition of success to determine whether she felt successful in the first place.

“I know who I am in this industry,” she says. “And while that may be a really simple statement, it took me a really long time to get to a place where, when I go to bed at night, I know I’m being 100% myself. I’m not trying to be someone I’m not, and that’s very liberating.” 

For years, Pearce gave plenty of mental real estate to how she was measuring up. Now, she seems much more interested in asking whether something feels authentically her. Honest Woman is her latest answer—and these days, that’s more than enough.

Photos by Dove Shore