Ashley McBryde Makes Dramatic Life Changes: 'I Just Needed to Stop Killing Myself' (Exclusive)

For months now, Ashley McBryde has been living out her dreams — taking home a shelf’s worth of trophies (including a first-time Grammy), racking up three new CMA nominations, two critically acclaimed albums and membership in the Grand Ole Opry.

“It's just pow-pow-pow,” the 40-year-old artist tells PEOPLE with no small amount of delight and amazement.

You can chalk it all up to her relentless drive and abundant musical gifts, but McBryde herself is also crediting something more karmic.

The avalanche of good stuff has clearly been piling up since she started taking several important steps toward self-care, including making the hard decision, in June 2022, to give up alcohol.

“It’s sort of like I can hear the universe saying, ‘Kid, you were just in your own way,’” says McBryde.

She says she quit drinking quietly, privately, making a deliberate choice to leave a public announcement out of the equation.

“I decided that I wasn’t gonna talk about it at all until at least a year,” she explains, “because what I didn’t need was people on social media being like, ‘Ashley McBryde swears off alcohol!’ All people are gonna do is just wait for you to screw up, and that's really annoying. I did it for me. I didn't do it for social media.”

And so why is she talking about it now? Because people can’t help but notice outward changes, and they’re starting to ask. It’s obvious that she’s trimmer, fitter, and years have fallen off her face, which has long carried a certain world-weariness.

Already a powerful presence onstage, McBryde has been turning in electric performances, most notably at Nashville’s CMA Fest in June, where her stadium set proved she’s more than ready for larger venues.

“It’s the best I’ve felt, the best I’ve looked,” she says, “and the difference in my voice … If you had told me even 10 years ago, you think you love your voice? You should hear it without drinking, because along with drinking comes smoking for me.”

Though she allows for an occasional cigarette (which, she admits, makes her “feel like garbage”), she’s mostly given up that habit, too. Add in generous amounts of therapy, healthier eating and exercise — including a new passion, boxing — and McBryde says, she’s now “the happiest I’ve ever been.”

In July, she says, she even found herself celebrating turning 40, a benchmark that often invites dread.

“I was worried about it a little bit,” she says, “but it feels like a nice rite of passage. If this were an animated film, this is where they place the crown on my head, where I’m just like … I am now me. And I think that all has to do with making all the decisions I’ve been making, making all the changes I’ve been making, and recognizing, that’s who I am. I’m halfway to 80, and I just met me.”

It’s a startling statement from an artist who has built her career on songs — such as “Girl Goin’ Nowhere,” “Sparrow” and “Bible and a .44” — that seem written by someone who knows exactly who she is. But stay with her, and you’ll see that McBryde’s new self-discovery — and self-love — is really about reconciling all her contradictory sides.

Her painstaking process is now reflected on the cover of her latest album, The Devil I Know. In a multiple-exposure photo, McBryde poses as several aspects of her personality: bawdy, reckless, uninhibited, but also introspective, composed, self-assured.

“I am each of those characters,” she says. “I'm a complete person now. And I love that, and I celebrate it.”

The album’s 11 tracks, all co-written by McBryde, offer even more facets, and she invites listeners to embrace the variety: “I want them to not be confused that the country is so country, that the rock is so rock, that the tender is so tender, and that the ‘f--- you’ is so ‘f--- you.’ Just don't be confused about it, because that's how I felt about myself for so long. Just relax into the fact that that’s just how it is, and I’m so glad you’ve decided to join me.”

McBryde kicks off the album with “Made for This,” a fierce anthem that recounts her hand-to-mouth early years as a bar act. Written in 2018, the same year her debut album, Girl Goin’ Nowhere, was released, it now stands as testimony to the artist’s dogged ambition.

“You've got to want it more than you want anything else,” McBryde says. “You have to want it in a way, like, ‘I might die if I don't do it.’”

Current chart-climbing single, “Light on in the Kitchen,” offers McBryde an opportunity to display the warmth of her wisdom, much of it inspired by her mother. Just as deftly, she turns steely and stubborn on songs like “Women Ain’t Whiskey” and “The Devil I Know.”

McBryde has come to realize her tenderness and toughness can co-exist: “Through my mother and her sisters and that side of the family, I learned that you are as strong as you are kind … If you’re gonna be tough — and you have to be tough if you’re gonna do this for a living — then you have to carry all things in equal measure.”

In the title track’s lyrics, McBryde describes being surrounded by people trying to pull her in every different direction before deciding to stick with “the devil I know.”

“So in a positive way, the ‘devil I know’ is my own compass,” she says.

But that devil also has a darker side. McBryde motions to a tattoo on her left forearm: “Look at that guy.” It’s a new inking, on skin already heavily tattooed, that depicts a scarlet Satan’s menacing eyes staring back in a rearview mirror.

“I got this tattoo,” she says, “when I quit drinking.”

She quickly clarifies: “I’m not gonna be like, ‘Well, the devil is alcohol.’ That’s not true. But the version of me — the Blackout Betty version of me and all those other versions that were in control — are still right in the backseat, and boy, do they want to drive. Right now, I’m the one in the driver’s seat, and it’s OK. We’re all welcome here. We all belong, and I know when to employ each of us. But I’m driving.”

McBryde explains that she created Blackout Betty to cope with the after-effects of her benders: “I would be like, ‘I am ready to go home. I just have to figure out where Betty put my keys.’”

Another way she coped was to give Blackout Betty her own song. McBryde admits she showed up at the writing session (with frequent collaborators Aaron Raitiere and Nicolette Hayford) with a serious hangover.

“How gross is that?” McBryde says now. “That’s not country music. Merle Haggard’s not proud you did that.”

The rock-infused song is an album standout, its lyrics wincingly raw: “Lost your keys and you lost your phone / Last night’s makeup, still half on / You don’t even know how you got home / It’s time for you to grow up.”

The self-loathing is in full view, but these days, McBryde also finds something else in the song when she performs it.

“There’s a lot of self-compassion,” she says. “When I’m singing it, I’m going … ‘Ohh, kiddo …” She tsks sympathetically.

Looking back, McBryde plainly sees she chose a career field that floats on alcohol — from the venues that serve it, to the parties that encourage it, to the lyrics that celebrate it — and she soaked it all up. Her reputation was cinched by the time Eric Church brought her to his stage, in 2017, to give her a career breakthrough performance. He introduced her as a “whiskey-drinking badass.”

The description stuck, and McBryde kept living up to it. (“I love whiskey,” she says. “I love the way it smells. I’d wear it as perfume if I could.”) Periodically, she made attempts to moderate, she says, but the slope always proved too slippery. Last year, she reached the realization that her drinking had put her on the edge of an abyss: “I wasn’t hurting anyone. I wasn’t unreliable. I wasn’t embarrassing my band or my business. But I was close enough to know that that was the next thing that would happen.”

She decided, she says, “that maybe part of being the ‘whiskey-drinking badass’ is knowing when to set it down, knowing when it’s costing you too much. This had become too costly, and I’m not willing to trade this — what I do, what I love — for anything.”

She says she asked for help “and I got it,” soon surrounding herself with both a therapy team and a treatment team. The hard work began. “At first I was like, I’m not abusing,” she says. “And then when you’re away from it for a while, you’re like, oh, s---, yeah, I was. I definitely was.”

She also learned that understanding and changing behavior wasn’t as simple as just quitting. “It’s all the decisions that lead up to that decision [to drink],” she says. “If you’ve been drinking this hard for this long, everything is that. And so you have to relearn how to do everything. And sometimes it’s really painful.”

The re-education is ongoing, she adds: “I’ll still encounter a situation where I’ll be like, oh, normally I would drink about this. And I go ahead and sit with that feeling and I’m like, OK, you had a great show or you had a great interview, or you had a great interaction, or whatever. Why on earth would you punish yourself for that? It takes a while to understand that’s what’s going on. Literally, it was punishing myself for doing good things. And when I stopped doing that, the good things got better.”

She considers it no coincidence that her career is now next level. In just this past year, she took home ACM and CMA awards for music event of the year (for “Never Wanted to Be That Girl” with Carly Pearce), a Grammy for the same performance and a Grammy nomination for her 2022 concept album Ashley McBryde Presents: Lindeville. Last December, she reached a personal pinnacle, membership in the Opry; she wept through much of the induction ceremony. Now she’s up for three more CMA awards, including her second for album of the year, for Lindeville, and her fourth for female artist.

What she seems to be enjoying just as much as the accolades is her freedom from conduct unbecoming. “I don’t have to worry about something I might have said after having a couple drinks,” she says. “Now I can go, you know what? I said what I said. I can trust that, and I can trust many, many things.”

And yet she still inhabits a world steeped in alcohol. Nine of the 11 songs on her new album feature at least casual references to drinking; five include aspects of it in the title. That level of frequency, of course, isn’t unusual in the country genre.

“I don’t hate that about our culture at all,” she says. “I still function in the culture, and I still love it. I’m not mad at anybody that drinks. I still love being in bars. I still love all of it. And I lived that life so well that I won. I’ve done enough of it to write about it for the next hundred years.”

But a life without drinking also has meant sometimes making the choice to skip the pre-parties and after-parties at events, and it’s meant learning how to make mocktails after years of being the go-to bartender. It also has meant enduring such thoughtless comments as “I liked you better when you drank.”

The quick-witted McBryde has a ready riposte: “‘Dude, I f---ing liked you better when I drank!”

Today, McBryde says, she still loves “a good buzz,” but now she gets it working up a sweat with regular jogging. Boxing, which she took up at a therapist’s urging, is also giving her a new high.

“Early in the [boxing] training,” she recalls, “I looked like I might puke, and my trainer is like, ‘Are you OK? Do you need a break?’ And I was like, no matter how I feel right now, this beats a hangover a hundred times out of a hundred. And I love it, so now it’s just a thing. Instead of wanting a glass of delicious whiskey after a show, or if something’s going wrong, you gotta get me the bag. It’s so much fun.”

The best buzz of all, she says, “is just being alive.” Now that she feels that she’s fully taken the wheel, she’s not about to let her foot off the gas, especially knowing how fleeting a music career can be. She and her tight-knit band, she says, perform each show as if it were their last.

“I think that’s what gives us that little extra something on stage,” she says. “You can definitely see how much joy and love that we have across the stage.”

McBryde wants a career that lasts a lifetime, and with these new changes, she believes she’s fully equipped herself for longevity. No doubt that reward is greater than any trophy.

“I don’t need a day on the calendar,” she says (though she knows exactly the date she took her last drink). “I don’t need a parade. I just needed to stop killing myself.”

For more from Ashley McBryde, pick up the current issue of PEOPLE, on newsstands now.