What Chris Stapleton Brought to Their Duet, Says Carly Pearce, 'Blew My Mind' (Exclusive)

Carly Pearce and Chris Stapleton's duet, “We Don’t Fight Anymore,” is climbing the charts, but until the CMA Awards on Wednesday night, they had never performed it live together. For Pearce, it was finally a dream come true.

Just the rehearsal, she told to PEOPLE, was “like a religious experience — for me to be standing there and hear him sing this song that I wrote and have this come to life.”

In fact, because the two parts were recorded separately for the single, the two Kentucky natives had never even sung the song together privately.

And how did their voices sound when they finally blended live?

“Just like I thought it would,” Pearce, 33, said during a red carpet interview before the show. “Kentucky knows Kentucky. I don't know how to explain it, but when we sing, it just fits.”

Pearce went on to describe how Stapleton’s contribution helped shape the sound of the song in ways she’d never imagined.

“He called me on his way to the studio and asked me what was my wildest dream for the song,” she recalled. “And I said, ‘Go do what you feel.’ Obviously, I've had other collaborations, but it’s kind of like they sing a verse, I sing a verse, we sing a chorus. But he took the bridge of this song, and just made it his own and gave it a whole different meaning to the song and a different voice to the song — and it blew my mind.”

When Pearce finally listened to his track, she said, she asked her producer to remove her voice from the bridge. “I literally said, ‘Turn me off,” she said. “This is his bridge. It’s almost now a conversation, where we call and answer each other. He sings something that was just better than anything I could have ever told him to sing.”

Pearce has already turned into a collaborations queen with her award-winning chart-toppers “I Hope You’re Happy Now” (with Lee Brice) and “I Never Wanted to Be That Girl” (with Ashley McBryde). But, she said, she now doesn’t know if she can top the Stapleton collab.

The single is part of a flow of new music that Pearce has been releasing recently after riding the success of her groundbreaking 2021 album, 29, that chronicled her 2020 divorce from artist Michael Ray after just eight months of marriage. Working on a follow-up album, she admitted, “was really intimidating.”

“Life’s not chaotic like that anymore,” she said, “and we’re not in a global pandemic where you are at home being able to write all the time. But honestly, I’m really proud of the new music, and I feel like what 29 did for me is give me the confidence to be as country as I want to be, so I’m just really pushing into that.”

She promised that her new project, just completed, will continue to be inspired by her personal life, though the themes won’t be as stormy as the ones featured in 29. Pearce confirmed to PEOPLE that she is now dating her band’s drummer, BC Taylor, after ending a two-year relationship earlier this year with Nashville real estate agent Riley King.

“My personal life’s good,” she said.

The fact that she and Taylor work and travel together, she added, has made the relationship “much easier. It's much nicer. It’s a hard world out there,” she said, referring to the music industry, “and it’s hard to relate to people that don't know that world.”

She said the two became more than friends and work partners “over the summer.”

“I certainly never thought I would find myself in this situation,” Pearce said, “but it just happened. I’m happy. It’s good.”