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The Carly Pearce Story
The Person Who Believed In Me · Hosted by David Begnaud
▶ Watch The Episode"When Daniel Lee found her, she had lost a record deal, was cleaning Airbnbs to pay the rent, and had quietly stopped believing she might ever be a front person. One man's belief changed her life in 12 hours."
David Begnaud
Carly Pearce had been in Nashville for most of her young adult life,long enough to know what it felt like to be invisible. She'd grown up in a small town in Northern Kentucky, the kind of kid who sang before she could form full sentences, who convinced her parents to pull her out of high school after ninth grade so she could move to Pigeon Forge, Tennessee and perform six shows a day, five days a week at Dollywood. She wasn't chasing a dream. She believed it was her destiny.
But Nashville is its own kind of education. For eight years she did the rounds: showcases, label meetings, demo recordings. The town had heard her voice. They knew she could sing. And still, door after door closed. Not with cruelty, usually. With something almost worse,polite encouragement that never converted into a signature on a contract. She was told she was amazing. She was told they'd be in touch. She was told, implicitly and eventually explicitly, that what she was doing wasn't enough.
By her mid-twenties, she had lost a record deal and was singing backup for actress Lucy Hale during Hale's brief country music stint. She was cleaning Airbnbs on the side to cover rent. The music industry had seen her. It just hadn't chosen her. And there is a particular kind of exhaustion that settles in when the thing you've built your entire identity around seems to have run out of road.
"I was probably at my lowest of feeling like the whole entire music industry didn't think I was good enough."
Carly PearceThat was the woman who walked into a coffee shop to meet a Nashville music publisher named Daniel Lee.
Daniel Lee was known in Nashville as a hard-ass,the kind of music publisher who would tell you a melody was good and then immediately tell you the rest of the song wasn't. He was not a man who wasted kind words. So when he sat down with Carly at Edge Hill Cafe and told her,after acknowledging everything the industry had said and done,that he believed she was special and that he was going to help her figure it out, it should have moved the needle.
It didn't. Not at first. Carly had heard promising words before. She'd watched too many people stop answering emails after the initial pitch. She politely told him she'd see if he was serious, then went back to singing backup. What changed things wasn't inspiration. It was logistics: Lucy Hale canceled her tour. Suddenly Carly had no gig, no income, and she called Daniel. Were you serious? He had a publishing deal in front of her within days. And then he said he wanted her to meet a producer named Michael "Busby" Busbice.
What Daniel understood,and what almost everyone else in Nashville had missed,was not that Carly needed to be made over. She needed to be steered back toward herself. The era of bro-country and pop-leaning crossover had created enormous pressure on artists, especially women, to chase what was already working on radio. Daniel could smell it when Carly was drifting. He'd stop her and say: you are a Patti Loveless, Alison Krauss, nineties country purist. Stop fighting it. Your voice is what carries the music. Don't overshine it.
"I stopped chasing other people. He just really propped me up to get my confidence back."
Carly PearceThe song was called "Every Little Thing." Carly and Busby had written it together,haunting, spare, deeply country, with a melodic simplicity that let her voice carry the whole weight. And nobody thought it was the one. A Nashville manager listened to five of her songs, identified it as the most special, and then looked her in the eye and told her it would never get her across the finish line. Carly called Daniel, devastated. He told her to trust the process.
The song went to JR Schuman at SiriusXM's The Highway. He listened and told her: "Are you ready for your life to change?" Carly, skeptical, said she had a dinner to get to. She drove to dinner. She sat down. There was already a DM on her Instagram from Allison Jones, the head of A&R at Big Machine Records. It said: Call me in the morning. You found your three minutes.
By the next morning, Carly had climbed to number one on iTunes as an independent artist,selling 6,000 units a week, a nearly unheard-of figure in 2016 for someone without a label. Managers were calling. Agents were calling. Artists were tweeting the song. The same manager who had told her "Every Little Thing" would never work crossed her path not long after. They both knew what had happened. The song that wasn't good enough was now the beginning of everything.
"The same exact song,in 12 hours,changed my entire life."
Carly PearceSuccess in Carly's story has a way of arriving in full circles. She had spent two years performing at Dollywood as a teenager, doing six shows a day while her mom sat alone in their one-bedroom, one-bathroom apartment decorated with grizzly bears. She'd met Dolly Parton only briefly in those years. Then, years later, she received a call from Dollywood,she thought it was for a commercial. She heard high heels clicking down the hallway and knew. Dolly Parton invited her to become a member of the Grand Ole Opry, an honor given by surprise, always by a fellow member. Carly said she spent the entire moment internally willing Dolly to just say it,and then she did.
The Grammy came with Ashley McBryde, for a song Carly wrote called "Never Wanted To Be That Girl",the story of two women who realize in the same moment they've been lied to by the same man. It was Carly's idea. She wrote it. She sang it. And she stood on that stage bouncing with a genuineness that was unmistakable,not just joy, but vindication. She had also won Female Vocalist of the Year at both the ACMs and CMAs that same year. The industry that had kept saying no was now stacking hardware on her shelf.
But even with all of it,the Opry induction, the Grammy, the number-ones,Carly says she still sometimes feels like the same girl at 26 who needed a pick-me-up. She still texts Daniel when she's doubting herself. He still sends her messages when her Shazam numbers climb. The relationship didn't end at the breakthrough. It became something permanent,the rare mentorship that aged into genuine friendship.
Carly's marriage lasted eight months. She knew something was wrong on her wedding night. And rather than stay,because of faith, or public image, or the social pressure to make it work,she blew up her life to get out. Her label head, Scott Borchetta, knew her well enough to know she needed to write about it. She turned in six raw, intense songs thinking they'd never see the light of day. He called and said: we have to put these out now. The resulting album, 29, became some of the most important music of her career.
It's a pattern Carly has come to understand about herself: her best work lives in the wound. She's not someone who manufactures emotion. She gets five feet away from the pain and writes from there. And her fans feel it,they don't respond to the uptempo crowd-pleasers she's occasionally tried. They respond when she goes deep. They respond to the real thing. When David asked her whether she sometimes worries she needs pain in order to write great music, she paused and then answered honestly: Carly Pearce without pain isn't really Carly Pearce.
But here's what sits just underneath that honesty: she's still fighting for her place. She hasn't been nominated at the major country awards in several years. In one particular 12-hour stretch,bookending the show's central conceit almost perfectly,she won a CMT Award for her Chris Stapleton duet and then woke up to find herself absent from the ACM nominations. The highest high to the lowest low in a single night. She doesn't want a bigger ego. She just wants the roller coaster to level out a little.
"Sometimes pain's used for purpose. I was writing about it to survive."
Carly PearceNear the end of the episode, David asked Carly what she would say to Daniel Lee if he were in the room with her right now. She took a breath, then said: You thought you were just having a meeting with an artist. It was actually a lifeline. And it truly was the reason I didn't move home. She had been looking at apartments to leave Nashville when he found her. She had almost been gone.
Today, Daniel is working with a young artist named Sela Campbell,a girl he describes as reminding him of Carly,and Carly is bringing her out on tour. The thing Daniel built with Carly, he's now doing again. And Carly gets to watch it from the other side. She has become, in a way, the proof of concept that makes Daniel's next act of belief possible.
At the very end of the conversation, Carly was asked what she wanted her legacy to be. She didn't hesitate: she wants to be remembered as someone who had a true impact on country music. Not a flash. Not a trend. A legacy. She's a country music purist who always was one,who got pushed off that path for years, then found her way back to it through the belief of one person who saw what she couldn't see in herself. And now she's working on her next album, with Daniel back in her corner, going back to her origin story. Back to the beginning. Back to who she always was.
"You continued to remind me that I am enough. And you continue to make me believe that I matter in music."
Carly Pearce, speaking to Daniel LeeSubscribe to The Do Good Crew newsletter,free, weekly, and always worth opening.
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