You oughta know Ashley McBryde

To most people, seeing the shores of two oceans in the course of a week would be a vacation, but for one former ASU student, it's all in a day's work.

Ashley McBryde is an up-and-coming country music artist whose musical roots go deep. She was playing mandolin at four, and started learning guitar at nine.

"When I was 12, I wrote my first real song and my parents kept asking me where I got the song," she said. "They were a little concerned at the depth a 12-year-old was trying to reach, but they still never discouraged it."

McBryde enrolled in ASU in 2001 as a music education major, but found her calling to songwriting too persistent.

"I kept feeling out of place," she said. "I was sitting in a theory class … and was trying to do my work and couldn't concentrate, and at the time I was playing like five nights a week in Memphis. I was missing a lot of class because I was playing so much, and I just kind of put my pencil down."

She eventually dropped out and followed her dream to Nashville in 2006, but Jonesboro was important to her career in other ways. Before she started playing in bars, she was playing for local friends who would challenge her to play covers for them.

"They didn't even know I could play. It was something I always kind of kept to myself and shared with my family," she said. "I wrote a ton (of songs) in my time at Arkansas State."

McBryde released her first album in 2006. Since then, it's sold close to 3,000 copies.

Now she's working on her second, tentatively titled Break It Fast. A departure from her self-titled debut, McBryde describes this one as her first full-length work. It's set to be done by mid-February.

"This CD has potential to put me on the map as a songwriter," she said. "As much as I enjoyed the first one, it's four or five years old. I'm four or five years older, and the music has really changed since then."

Fans can expect a "completely different feel" from this album. "It's more Americana than the country that's on the radio right now," she said.

Her work schedule is ambitious to say the least. She spends Sunday through Thursday from 2 p.m. to midnight in the studio. When she's not recording, she's traveling to venues in places such as Bowling Green, Memphis, Little Rock and Jonesboro.

This summer, McBryde drove from Memphis to Flint, Mich., to Indiana, then to Nashville. The next week she drove to North and South Carolina, then drove to Gulf Shores, Ala. and back in less than 24 hours.

"I had seen the Atlantic and the Gulf of Mexico in the same eight-day span. … It's kind of geographically confusing," she said.

Despite being a Colgate Country Showdown state winner three times and opening for the likes of Chris Cagle, Artemis Pyle's self-titled band and Barbara Blue, her ambitions show no sign of slowing.

She's collaborating with famed country songwriter Lisa Carver and hopes to continue this trend.

"My next goal is to have a cut, whether it's a song I co-write or a song I write on my own," she said. "It would be nice to have a song on the radio even if it's not me singing it. … Where everything is for me is in the songwriting."

"True life inspires almost everything," she said. "I usually say, as interesting and horrible as it is, ‘My dirty laundry is your entertainment.' And occasionally, yours is mine."

McBryde will be back in Jonesboro on Thursday, Feb. 3 where she will be playing from 8 p.m. to 10 p.m. at Upper Crust Pizza Co., 3120 Shelby Drive.

For more information, visit her website at ashleymcbryde.com or reverbnation.com/ashleymcbryde.