ABCCarly Pearce’s current single, “Next Girl,” is filled with musical nods to ‘90s country and a twangy, upbeat message of empowerment for any woman staring down a relationship full of cheesy pickup lines and broken promises.
But Carly says that the idea for the song actually started from a much sadder place: Her feelings of heartbreak and loss during her own “failed relationships.”
“I had this title, but I, in true Carly Pearce fashion, heard it more as a sad little letter to the next girl,” she recounts in a new installment of CMT’s “Hit Story” series.
But the song started taking on a peppier element after the singer brought it to Shane McAnally and Josh Osborne, who co-wrote the song with Carly and are also producing her new batch of music.
“They totally heard it as just, something like an anthem for women,” she continues. “And it almost wrote itself. We were just spewing things out, all together, and it was just a really, really fun song to write.
Since dropping “Next Girl,” Carly’s hinted at a handful of other unreleased new songs that she’s been working on during the pandemic. Many of them stick to the the themes of heartbreak and love gone wrong, and Carly — who divorced her husband, Michael Ray, last summer — says that’s the subject matter that she finds most creatively fruitful right now.
“I feel like I’m onto something with these, writing songs about relationships that don’t work,” she adds.
.@carlypearce’s latest girl-anthem was a song that basically wrote itself. #HitStory ? pic.twitter.com/mwRrUWByYy
— CMT (@CMT) January 22, 2021
By Carena Liptak
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