Trust Issues

Album: Hummingbird (2024)
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Songfacts®:

  • Carly Pearce confronts the emotional battlefield of love after heartbreak in "Trust Issues." It's a story of cautiously venturing into new territory, a hesitant dance with vulnerability. Pearce sings of a guarded heart, scarred by past experiences, but as she takes down the barrier, she finds love again.
  • "Trust Issues" is the lone love song on Pearce's fourth album, Hummingbird, and is the first one she wrote for the project. It emerged during her relationship with former Minor League Baseball player Riley King, the first guy she dated after her public divorce from fellow country singer Michael Ray.
  • When Pearce started writing for Hummingbird, she initially struggled with navigating a new direction while the raw emotions of her past lingered. She wrote in her phone a potential song title, "Trust Issues."

    "That's kind of on the theme of, you never know how hurt you are until you try to love somebody else," Pearce told Grammy.com. "But I wanted to spin it into a hopeful and happy thing, because I love titles where you look at them and you think it's gonna be one thing, but it's a totally different thing."
  • The song she penned with Nicolle Galyon and Jordan Reynolds subverts expectations, taking a title that suggests negativity and spinning it into a tale of hope and redemption.

    "I got in the room with two of my favorite people, Nicolle Galyon and Jordan Reynolds, and we crafted this song that felt so hopeful. It's a love song, but it's a love song out of pain," she explained. "And I remember when we wrote it - I see my albums in pictures, and I thought this was such an important facet to this transitional period of my life - of moving on."
  • While Pearce's relationship with Riley King ended after two years, the song remains a significant marker in her personal journey. She later dated drummer BC Taylor, who is a member of her performing band.

    "I wrote this when I had fallen in love for the first time since my divorce," Pearce told Consequence. "That relationship, obviously, did not work out, but it allowed me to open my heart again to somebody who was safe, and who was a good person. I will forever cherish that song because that was really wonderful for me to be able to feel like I could open myself back up."
  • Pearce debuted the song during an early-November 2022 performance at Nashville's the Listening Room.

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