Heard as a song about a random woman, Ashley McBryde’s new single, “The Devil I Know,” seems to capture a headstrong personality who embraces her imperfections, although it’s unclear whether that’s because she’s emotionally healthy or she’s just intellectually lazy.
But heard as it’s intended – as a reflection of McBryde’s own rebellious path to self-determination – “The Devil” is more like Hank Williams’ “Mind Your Own Business,” an aural middle finger to the peanut gallery.
“It doesn’t matter what you do,” McBryde says, “somebody’s gonna have something to say about it.”
Few people receive as much feedback as an artist – from managers, label executives, family members, music critics, fans and radio stations, all of whom have a vested interest in getting a reaction.
“It’s just tricky,” says songwriter-producer Jeremy Stover (Justin Moore, Travis Denning). “Even though those outside forces are around, you gotta keep plowing, and trusting yourself, and trusting the people that you trust the most.”
Two, maybe three, years ago, McBryde put some trust in Stover and fellow songwriter Bobby Pinson (“Burning Man,” “All I Want To Do”), writing “The Devil I Know” at Stover’s second-floor office on Nashville’s Music Row. Pinson had the set-up line and the hook – “Hell, there’s hell everywhere I go/ I’m just stickin’ with the devil I know” – and it naturally resonated with everyone in the room, though they had to figure out exactly what it meant.
“We were in D, the people’s key, and just kind of throwing things out,” McBryde remembers.
All three writers banged around on their guitars as the song found its direction, both musically and lyrically. Pinson, as McBryde recalls it, took the lead with the melody and chords, and he was determined to overcome having the devil in the title. “I like to have a melody mapped out that sounds like a hit,” he says. “It doesn’t matter what good words you put in if the melody is not a hit melody, especially in a song like this, where the title can work against you in a world where we hope there’s more God than devil.”
McBryde recalled the negative reactions she received as a female playing a bar in Bardstown, Ky., as a teenager, and how she was determined to follow her own course. She changed the city to Elizabethtown – “I thought it would sound a little nicer and float along a little better,” she explains – and by the end of the first verse, she demonstrated how she grew to “like my brand of hurtin’.”
As they jumped into the chorus, the rebel spirit really took over: “Mama says get my ass to church” is a phrase that scoffs at religious conventions. “Daddy says get my ass to work” was the natural sequel. “When you got ‘Mama,’ if you follow it with ‘Daddy,’ you can’t say the same thing,” Stover quips. “That’s kind of hillbilly logic.”
That chorus continued to acknowledge the outside voices until it reached its self-guided premise, “I’m stickin’ with the devil I know.”
“For me, living and getting it right is kind of like skiing,” Pinson says. “You can have a professional skier tell you how to do it, you can have your friends tell you how to do it, you can have your loved ones tell you how to ski, but at the end of the day, you take a little cart up the hill, and if you get down unbroken, you skied. And that’s kind of what living is. It’s like how do I want to fall? Do I want to fall going down this mountain? Or do I want to fall going over this cliff? I’ll stick with the devil I know.”
The second verse shifted from professional pursuits to romantic choices, embracing a rocky relationship that ultimately matches two fiery people who understand each other at their foundation. Before the day was over, they fashioned a guitar/vocal work tape with a fair amount of finger picking, though McBryde had no intention of keeping that quasi-folk sound.
“I knew that the song had more teeth than that,” she says, “so when the band and I got together in pre-production before going to the studio to play the song, we knew that at least in that chorus, we wanted to do those big [heavy notes]. And we weren’t sure how much else we could get away with. Luckily, our producer is Jay Joyce (Eric Church, Brothers Osborne). And so he said, ‘Not only can you get away with that, you can get away with way more.’”
They referenced Steve Earle’s “Copperhead Road” as the level of power and rawness that they could infuse into “The Devil,” and when they set about the actual recording date at Joyce’s Neon Cross Studio, they were ready for a production that evolves from easy-going to raucous. “We spent quite a bit of time hammering out that arrangement,” Joyce says. “It didn’t come together easily, but it was worth the journey.”
At least two acoustic guitars create a rhythmic soup for the intro, and as the sound becomes increasingly tough, McBryde came up with a five-note segue for the chorus that emphasizes that change. It’s a quiet, acoustic background figure in the opening chorus, though it becomes a vocal-and-rock-guitar unison thing in later moments. Guitarist Matt Helmkamp enhanced the performance with a brief-but-searing solo.
“Matt does with guitar solos what we do with lyrics,” McBryde says. “It’s not like he’s playing what the lyrics are in his solo. He’s playing what it felt like when we wrote the lyrics. The ‘eeergh’ and the ‘dammit’ that you feel when you’re writing – that frustration – he can capture that in his solos. And I’m glad he doesn’t know how good he is.”
When McBryde tackled her final vocals, Joyce surprised her by having her do a pass 10 feet away from a telescope microphone. She thought it would be a background effect. Instead, it became a filtered, distant lead voice that dominated the first chorus, pulling the intensity back at a spot where the tendency for most producers would be to amp up the energy.
To McBryde, it makes that chorus feel like an internal monologue. To Joyce, it was just a different texture with no specific interpretation. “Usually, if you change the scenery, the listener will put it together in their own sort of way,” he reasons.
“The Devil I Know” became the title track of McBryde’s latest album, and she lobbied for it as the lead single, though Warner Music Nashville opted for “Light On In The Kitchen” instead. She fought again to make “The Devil” the follow-up, and she ultimately won. The label released it to radio via PlayMPE on Feb. 26, though she had to compromise. A major broadcast chain complained that it used the word “ass” too many times – she pressed for an acceptable number, she says, but didn’t get one. Ultimately, she and Joyce came up with three “clean” alternatives, and agreed on changing “get my ass to church” to “get on back to church.”
It’s not clear if it will make a difference, but McBryde says that her radio successes thus far have made many fans think she does “finger-picky ballads,” so they’re surprised at the heat she brings in concert. Thus, “The Devil I Know” should help the uninitiated begin to see her as the artist the industry knows.
“We had to put a single out that is palatable, that is very country, that is very representative of what our live show is like,” she says. “I’m so glad of every tooth and nail I lost having to fight for it. I think I think we made the right decision.”
