Carly Pearce Shares How She Turned Her Pain Into Purpose Following Divorce

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In a new interview, Carly Pearce is opening up about her painful 2020 divorce from fellow country singer Michael Ray.

In the span of two years, country singer Carly Pearce went public with her budding relationship, got engaged, got married, and got divorced. She chronicled this journey in two pieces of work: her February 2021 EP titled 29 and her September 2021 album titled 29: Written In Stone.

Two months after the EP was released, she posted a photo of herself in the recording studio on social media with the caption, “I’ve realized over the last few weeks that I wasn’t entirely finished writing my 29 chapter…”

At the time, she spoke with People Magazine to talk about how she knew she needed a full album about her painful divorce.

“What you hear in this project is every stage of a relationship ending, the realization, the grief, the anger, the confusion…as soon as I could see all of these songs, I saw the pieces that they represented, and I felt like it was finished,” she said.

Since the album’s release, Pearce has been worried about “creating a successor” as successful and meaningful as 29: Written In Stone. 

Carly Pearce has been gearing up to release her upcoming album, Hummingbird, which will be released on June 14.

She is currently doing press since she just released her latest single, “My Place,” On Friday (April 5).

Pearce recently appeared on the BBC Sounds’ April 1st episode of Woman’s Hour, where the topic was women in country music! Hosted by Nuala McGovern, Pearce really opened up about what she took away from her divorce from Ray and how she turned her pain into purpose.

“I was embarrassed at first. I was humiliated. I felt a lot of shame, I felt a lot of embarrassment that I had failed, especially being a young woman living in the South in the States,” she told McGovern. “Divorce is kind of something that you don’t do. And I felt like what that situation did for me is now it’s given me so much purpose outside of just singing country songs. My purpose is to show people you can use pain for purpose. There’s light after darkness. There’s a lot of light after darkness. And maybe the best season is coming.”

She didn’t even think the music she wrote while going through her divorce would ever even come out, because it felt “too personal.” She felt the music she was writing was like her diary.

McGovern asked her, “Do you feel scared to let people read your diary?”

Pearce revealed that she felt scared to let people see this side of her before 29:Written In Stone came out. But, she realized that she was able to show people that “no matter what your story is, you can own it and be proud of it and not be ashamed of it, which I think has then led me to be way more confident as a songwriter, and really as a person.”

Watch her open up about this in the video below, and listen to the full episode here.