As the U.S. emerges from the COVID-19 pandemic, Ashley McBryde is ready with a bit of a souvenir this Friday, as her Never Will: Live from a Distance EP arrives.
Created while touring was impossible, the six-song collection is an expression of how eager Ashley and her band, Deadhorse, were to play.
“We were actually going into a sound studio to record some stuff for daytime TV and for late night TV,” she explains. “But we hadn’t played together in, at that point, it was three months or six months, I can’t remember how long it had been.”
“So, we went through all the processes to get everybody tested,” she continues, “and we get everybody in here in this room, and we thought, ‘Well, we’re not gonna just record two songs. We should record some of the songs off the record…'”
“And then after that, we thought, ‘We’ve got all this material. It can’t just sit on a shelf. We should be getting it out to people,'” she tells ABC Audio.
The “Little Dive Bar from Dahlonega” hitmaker is the first to admit there’s one major thing missing from the record, however. “It is kind of weird to me visually watching it, because there’s no audience,” she points out, “so it’s kind of a muted version of our animated selves.”
“But we performed really well that day,” she reflects. “So I thought we should put this together as a live EP and go ahead and get it out there.”
Live from a Distance includes Ashley’s current single, “Martha Divine,” but doesn’t cover Never Will‘s most well-known track, her top ten, “One Night Standards.”
Next month, Ashley returns to the road, hitting more than 35 cities on her This Town Talks Tour, starting June 12 in Roanoke, Virginia.
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