ALBUM REVIEW: Ashley McBryde Offers Vivid Snapshots of Life on ‘The Devil I Know’
Henry Carrigan
Posted On December 26, 2023
EDITOR’S NOTE: As the end of the year approaches, we’re taking a look back at albums we weren’t able to review when they first came out. The Devil I Know was released in September.
As she did on 2022’s Lindeville, Ashley McBryde offers snapshots of life on the road, the constraints of family life, the limitations of life in a small town, the disappointments of love, and the promise inherent in dogged self-affirmation on The Devil I Know.
Ashley McBryde (photo by Katie Kauss)
The album kicks off with the propulsive “Made for This,” a straight-ahead rocker with screaming guitars that delivers a simple message: if you choose the life of an artist, you gotta be ready to travel in vans and change in bathroom stalls on your way to traveling in style on your own bus and headlining shows. As McBryde shouts, when you endure, you know you’re made for this life on the road.
In a gently beautiful homage to the lessons she’s learned from her mother, McBryde strings together little bits of wisdom about life and love in “Light On in the Kitchen.” The warmth of the instruments evokes the tender moments of sitting at the kitchen table after midnight as a loved one dispenses lessons such as “when you make friends always be colorblind” and “pray for those who don’t have a prayer.” On the haunting “Learned to Lie,” driven by spiraling lead runs on the instrumental bridge and outro and by McBryde’s exquisite vocals, she sings of the dark underbelly of family relationships. She acknowledges with regret that “I wish I’d learned how to love the same way I / Learned to lie.”
The title track opens quietly before launching into a soaring anthem of self-affirmation; while everyone tells the singer what they think is good for her, she’s gonna stick with the lessons she’s learned the hard way and the self she knows best and is most comfortable with. The rollicking honky-tonk anthem “Whiskey and Country Music” proclaims that “Patsy on vinyl” and good whiskey “take the edge off when I’m goin’ through it.” The album closes with the gentle bluegrass of “6th of October,” which counsels “To not be afraid of our scars / And who we are.”
With a photographer’s eye and an artist’s soul, Ashley McBryde captures the yearnings of the human spirit and the lies we sometimes tell ourselves to assuage the pain. The Devil I Know once again collects McBryde’s exquisite lyrical portraits of human vulnerability and the ragged ways we move through this world.
Ashley McBryde’s The Devil I Know was released Sept. 8 by Warner Music Nashville.
