Carly Pearce’s Honest Woman Turns Back to Bluegrass

Carly Pearce performing in Leamington, Ontario, in 2025.

Dan Tyminski sings on two songs of Carly Pearce’s fifth album. Molly Tuttle sings on one of the same two. Neither is a name you book to widen a radio audience, which is the clearest statement Honest Woman makes about what it is for.

The record came out on 28 August through BBR Music Group and BMG Nashville, sixteen tracks, co-produced by Pearce with Ben West. “Sometimes finding yourself means finding your way back home,” she said of it. “For me, it meant coming home… to my truth, my story, and the woman I am at my core.”

Sixteen Songs and a Way Back

The sequence runs “Dream Come True”, “Church Girl”, “She Don’t”, “You Can Have Him”, “How Long”, “WWJD”, “Same Circus”, “Happy For Myself”, “If I Don’t Leave I’m Gonna Stay”, “I Don’t Have The Heart”, “He Don’t Like My Dogs”, “Leave My Heart Alone”, “Who’s Lying Here”, “Daisy”, “What If You Loved Me” and “Why God Why Me”.

Sixteen tracks is a long album by current country standards, where twelve is the norm and streaming logic argues for more, shorter songs. It is also a length that lets an artist put four singles up front and still have a second half nobody has heard.

Holler reported the announcement in June, and Pearce framed it in terms of provenance rather than sound. “These songs tell that story. They hold pieces of my heart, where I come from, and the journey that brought me here.”

Two Guests Who Are Not a Radio Play

Tyminski is on “Who’s Lying Here” and “What If You Loved Me”; Tuttle joins him on the second. Both are bluegrass musicians of serious standing rather than crossover names, and putting them on a mainstream country album is a decision that costs something at radio and buys credibility instead.

Noise11 singles out “What If You Loved Me” as the track where the bluegrass background is most audible, which makes sense: it is the one carrying both guests at once.

The third feature works differently. Riley Green duets on “If I Don’t Leave I’m Gonna Stay”, and he is unambiguously a radio artist. Having all three on one record is the album’s actual structure — a mainstream single with a mainstream partner, and two songs where the guests come from the world Pearce started in.

The Songs That Arrived First

Five were out before release day: “Dream Come True”, “Church Girl”, “You Can Have Him”, “If I Don’t Leave I’m Gonna Stay” and “She Don’t”, the last released alongside the announcement itself.

That is nearly a third of the album given away in advance, and it is now the standard method. The gamble is that a listener who has already heard five songs still shows up for eleven more, and the compensation is that those five have had months to find an audience the album can inherit on day one.

The titles in the unheard portion do more work than the singles. “WWJD”, “Why God Why Me” and “Church Girl” put faith across three separate songs; “He Don’t Like My Dogs” and “Same Circus” are jokes; “Happy For Myself” and “Leave My Heart Alone” are the independence songs. It is a wider emotional spread than the singles implied.

Three songs about faith on one country album is not unusual; three that approach it from different angles is. A “WWJD” and a “Why God Why Me” are not the same posture, and running both alongside a song called “Church Girl” suggests a record willing to treat belief as a subject rather than a signal.

The two Tyminski tracks also sit late — thirteen and fifteen — which is where an album puts the material it does not expect radio to take. Whatever the singles are doing at the front, the back half is where the roots argument is actually made.

Dollywood at Sixteen

Pearce left Kentucky at sixteen to perform at Dollywood, which is the detail that makes the roots framing more than marketing. She played traditional material for years before a Nashville contract existed, so the bluegrass on this record is a return rather than an adoption.

That distinction matters because the reverse move is currently common. Plenty of mainstream artists have discovered an acoustic side at the point their radio singles stopped working, and audiences have become good at telling the difference between a homecoming and a rebrand.

The credentials in between are substantial: CMA Female Vocalist of the Year in 2021, ACM Female Artist of the Year in 2022, Grand Ole Opry membership and more than a hundred performances on that stage. Her last album, Hummingbird, produced a platinum single in “We Don’t Fight Anymore” with Chris Stapleton.

She also has a Grammy from a duet with Ashley McBryde, “Never Wanted to Be That Girl” — another artist whose fifth album arrived this year, and another whose route runs through the traditional end of the format.

Four Years of Being Told It Was Anxiety

The album’s title has a second referent. Pearce has recurrent pericarditis, an inflammation of the tissue around the heart, which she developed in 2020 and was not diagnosed with until 2024. The four years in between were spent being disbelieved.

“That was something I developed in 2020 and didn’t know what it was for a really long time,” she told Fox News at her Carly’s Closet fundraiser during CMA Fest. “It was kind of misdiagnosed, also dismissed.” The response she kept getting: “Oh, you have anxiety. Oh, you have a busy schedule. And it’s like, ‘No, something’s not right.'”

Her account of the fear is specific rather than general. “Is it going to happen again? Am I OK? For me, it was ‘Oh my gosh, is my heart OK? Am I going to have a heart attack?'” Her advice is equally plain: “Listen to your body, and be your own advocate. A lot of doctors dismissed me, and I was persistent until I got a diagnosis.”

She is stable now and has changed how she works. “I don’t need to turn the treadmill up to 12, or I don’t need to look over and try to outwork every single person in a class,” she said. “Just taking care of my body and listening to my body instead of thinking that it always needs to be on 10.”

What the Title Is Arguing

Pearce’s own summary of the record is the most useful thing she has said about it: “The heartbeat of Honest Woman: celebrating womanhood in all its contradictions. Being strong and still wanting to be loved.”

Contradiction is the operative word, and it explains the guest list rather than excusing it. A record can hold a Riley Green radio duet and a Dan Tyminski bluegrass turn without resolving the tension between them, in the same way its songwriter can be both a Grand Ole Opry member and someone who spent four years being told her chest pain was stress.

“It’s the most honest music I’ve ever made,” she said of the album. “I think I’m really celebrating being a woman and loving where I’m at in life.” The touring plan matches the framing — the Honest Woman: Up Close Tour is built on two-night residencies rather than a march through arenas.

Whether the roots turn holds is a question for the next album rather than this one. What is verifiable today is that a CMA and ACM winner in the middle of a radio career put two bluegrass singers on her record and named it after the least commercial thing she could have chosen to be.