Carly Pearce

Taylor Mill, and five shows a week at Dollywood

Carly Pearce was born Carly Cristyne Slusser on 24 April 1990 in Taylor Mill, northern Kentucky, and took her stage surname from her grandfather. The music she grew up around was bluegrass and traditional country rather than the radio product she would later make, a detail that stayed buried in her catalogue for years before it resurfaced as the organising idea of her 2026 record.

At sixteen she auditioned for Country Crossroads, a show at Dollywood in Pigeon Forge, Tennessee, and talked her parents into letting her leave high school for it. She performed there five times a week while finishing her education by homeschooling, and contributed to bluegrass compilation albums in the same period. It is an unusually long apprenticeship for a country singer of her generation: by the time she moved to Nashville at nineteen, in 2009, she had already done several hundred shows.

A deal lost, then a song that would not go away

Pearce signed a developmental deal with Sony Music Nashville in 2012 and lost it when the producer attached to her was let go. The years that followed involved part-time jobs rather than records. In 2015 the producer Busbee signed her to a developing-artist agreement, and in 2016 an independently released single, "Every Little Thing", picked up airplay on SiriusXM's The Highway. That traction, rather than a label's belief, is what produced a Big Machine Records contract.

"Every Little Thing" reached number one on Billboard's Country Airplay chart and number five on Hot Country Songs, and gave its name to her 2017 debut album. A self-titled second album followed in 2020, carrying "I Hope You're Happy Now", a duet with Lee Brice that also went to number one at country radio. Busbee died in 2019, which left that record as a document of a partnership that had only just started working.

29, and the years the awards arrived

The album that defined her public identity was 29: Written in Stone, released in 2021. Built around the collapse of a marriage, it reached number nine on Top Country Albums and number 83 on the Billboard 200 — her best showing on either chart — and produced two more Country Airplay number ones in "Never Wanted to Be That Girl", a duet with Ashley McBryde, and "What He Didn't Do". "Never Wanted to Be That Girl" won the Grammy for Best Country Duo/Group Performance in 2023, and remains her only Grammy. She has won three Country Music Association Awards and four Academy of Country Music Awards, and became a member of the Grand Ole Opry in 2021 after an invitation from Dolly Parton.

Hummingbird, her fourth album, arrived on 7 June 2024 on Big Machine and was framed as a recovery record rather than a breakup one. It performed less well commercially than its predecessor — number 31 on Top Country Albums, number 158 on the Billboard 200 — though its lead collaboration, "We Don't Fight Anymore" with Chris Stapleton, reached the country top ten. A deluxe edition, Hummingbird: No Rain, No Flowers, followed on 14 March 2025.

The heart condition that changed how she works

In May 2024 Pearce disclosed that she had been diagnosed with pericarditis, an inflammation of the tissue surrounding the heart. She had been living with the symptoms since 2020: chest pain that eased only when she bent forward and worsened when she lay back, along with severe shortness of breath. She has said repeatedly that doctors dismissed the symptoms before the diagnosis came, and has used interviews since to push other people to keep asking.

The practical consequence was that she had to redesign her shows to keep her heart rate down while the inflammation settled. By a health update in July 2024 she reported no major flare-ups, while remaining on medication and declining to call the condition resolved. The shift towards quieter, more acoustic staging in 2026 reads differently once that is on the record.

Honest Woman: a new label and a mostly acoustic record

Pearce announced her fifth studio album on 23 June 2026 and released it on 28 August, her first for BBR Music Group/BMG Nashville after the Big Machine years. Honest Woman runs to sixteen songs and around 53 minutes, and she co-produced all of it with Ben West. Her stated reason for making it was a return to source material: "This album takes me back to the beginning of my story, where the sounds of classic country and bluegrass music shaped who I am."

The personnel bear that out. Jeneé Fleenor plays fiddle, Bryan Sutton acoustic guitar, Byron House upright bass and Jerry Roe percussion. Dan Tyminski, formerly of Union Station, plays acoustic guitar and mandolin on "Who's Lying Here" and appears again on "What If You Loved Me", where Molly Tuttle adds vocals, guitar and banjo. Reviewers have reached for Alison Krauss and Lee Ann Womack as comparisons; Music Republic Magazine gave the album five out of five and picked out "She Don't", "How Long", "Leave My Heart Alone", "WWJD" and "You Can Have Him".

The singles came out over nine months rather than in a burst: "Dream Come True" in November 2025, "Church Girl" in January 2026, "If I Don't Leave I'm Gonna Stay" with Riley Green on 13 March 2026, then "You Can Have Him" and "She Don't" in July. The Riley Green duet, written by Devin Dawson, Seth Ennis, Jordan Minton and Jordan Reynolds, peaked at 33 on Country Airplay and 40 on Hot Country Songs — modest radio numbers for a record whose thematic case does not depend on them. Pearce has been blunt about the album's subject: the expectations attached to women and age. She also said she did not settle on the title until the very end.

Where she stands in October 2026

The 60th Annual CMA Awards nominations, announced on 10 September 2026, gave Pearce one nod: Musical Event of the Year for "If I Don't Leave I'm Gonna Stay", credited to her and Ben West as producers alongside Green. The ceremony is on 18 November 2026 on ABC, with final-ballot voting closing on 27 October.

Her touring year split cleanly in two. In May 2026 she ran six dates across the UK and Ireland under the Inside the Dream banner — Bristol Beacon on 13 May, Manchester Academy on 14 May, a Highways Festival headline slot at London's Royal Albert Hall on 16 May, Glasgow's SEC Armadillo on 18 May, Dublin's 3Olympia on 19 May and Belfast's Waterfront Hall on 20 May — with the Nashville sister duo Tigirlily Gold supporting throughout. That London headline followed her appearance at the same hall in 2025 on the Opry 100 bill. Since 10 September she has been playing the Honest Woman: Up Close shows in North America, a deliberately smaller format built as two-night stands rather than a single pass through each city.