Carly Pearce Gives Update After Michael Ray Split on Lindsay Ell’s YouTube Show: ‘I’m Getting Better’

Carly Pearce is opening up about her life after splitting from her husband, Michael Ray. The singer, who just celebrated her second No. 1 hit with “I Hope You’re Happy Now” with Lee Brice, had a virtual conversation with her good friend, Lindsay Ell, on Lindsay’s Living wELL YouTube show, where she gave an update on her personal life.

“I’ll say I’m getting better. I will say that I am grateful for quarantine,” Carly said in a clip shared on social media. “You know how fast our lives are; you know how easy it is to kind of tap into who we are as artists and ignore our actual hearts, and our actual lives and things like that. Quarantine was good to me.

“It showed me a lot, and I had to make some really big decisions for my own life,” she continued. “I feel like this is another time in my life where maybe I thought I had it all figured out and it very abruptly switched on me., and I’m left going, ‘Well, what does this mean? What does this mean? Why did this have to happen? Why did this happen to me?”

Carly celebrated her first No. 1 hit with “Every Little Thing” in 2017. Although she was just learning about the music business when that song took off, the Kentucky native says in many ways, that season reminds her of where she is now.

“I feel like I’m reverting back to my Nashville sense of thinking about pre-‘Every Little Thing’ girl and going, ‘You knew what you had to do, you did it and now you’re left going, ‘What is coming?'” Carly said. “In my life, it has proven to me, when I do what I know I need to do and I don’t give up and I love myself more, I see why. So I am hopeful and excited for what the next chapter holds for me.”

Carly is also working on new music, which she says will reflect not only the recent changes in her personal life, but also her grief over the loss of her friend and producer, Busbee.

“I oddly just started to feel a rush of emotions of things that I felt like I wanted to say,” Carly recently shared with Everything Nash and other outlets. “Going through a lot of personal growth during this time and felt like I was hanging on to Busbee and had to kind of deal with that in its own time. It felt like it was jolted and sped up for me. We had some hard conversations of, do we continue on with this music or do we do something new? All of a sudden, I felt so creative and so much at peace. I felt like I had a lot to say that I didn’t know was in me. And maybe that’s because as an artist, not that you become a character, but you certainly go into autopilot of what you do every day.

“When I was making my second record, I would fly home to do laundry, to pack up, to leave by midnight, but then I’d have a write in there somewhere,” she added. “My head would just be somewhere else. And so this time I’ve just had time for the first time since I got a record deal to just write.”

Watch the entire Living wELL episode here.