'Never Wanted to Be That Girl': Carly Pearce, Ashley McBryde come together for new kind of cheating song
"We didn’t want to try to do anything that had already been done so well."
Two women singing together about loving the same man isn’t a new one premise a for country music song. Reba McEntire and Linda Davis explored the idea in 1993 with their duet, "Does He Love You."
But when Carly Pearce and Ashley McBryde teamed up to write their song, "Never Wanted to Be That Girl," they say they knew they wanted to approach the topic in a different way.
"We didn’t want to just try to reboot ‘Does He Love You,'" McBryde recently told ABC Audio. "We didn’t want to try to do anything that had already been done so well."
"So in this one, these women don’t confront each other ... nobody wants to be the other woman, and they’re both finding out at the same time that they are," she continued. "And they’re just saying, ‘I just never wanted to be this girl.’"
For Pearce, the song was an exciting chance to work with a singer with whom she says she long felt a kinship.
"I feel like when I’ve performed next to Ashley in writers’ rounds, we sing the same," she said.
"She’s a little edgier than me, as far as, she’s got a slight bit of southern rock to her," Pearce said, "but on the country side, we anticipate each other’s voices in the same way. And I wanted to sing with that."
Those similar vocal skills translated to the studio: "We’re swapping lines and then swapping who’s singing harmony," agreed McBryde. "It happened organically in the writing room, so we wanted to make sure it got recorded that way."
"Never Wanted to Be That Girl" comes off of Pearce’s latest album, "29: Written in Stone."