Carly Pearce marked the dawn of her next era of music with her soulful ballad, “We Don’t Fight Anymore,” a soulful collaboration with award-winning country giant Chris Stapleton. Pearce’s highly-anticipated heartache song displays her expert storytelling and captures the emotion of both people in a couple losing their spark. It's “about the really painful truth that sometimes a relationship can go cold and be indifferent.”
Pearce revealed earlier this month that Stapleton was her mystery duet partner after teasing the song on her social media channels, sharing details little by little. The two Kentucky-born artists teamed up on the song that Pearce wrote with frequent collaborator Shane McAnally and Pete Good. It was produced by Pearce with McAnally and Josh Osborne. Pearce shared that a longtime dream of collaborating with Stapleton came true with help from his wife, Morgane Stapleton. Pearce shared that she “knew that I heard (Stapleton) on this song, and I don’t know how to explain that,” so she did “what any person should do,” and asked his wife first. She DMed Morgane on Instagram to ask if she could send the couple “We Don’t Fight Anymore” in hopes of collaborating, “and kind of the rest, in my opinion, is gonna be history.”
“I’ve always wanted to write music that makes people feel something — whether that is feeling seen, less alone, happy or even uncomfortable. ‘We Don’t Fight Anymore’ felt like I was writing one of those stories that, whether or not we want to include it in our social media highlight reel, we’ve either been there or are living there right now,” Pearce said in a statement of the inspiration behind her latest ballad. “Having Chris Stapleton join me on this song was a dream come true and he unlocked an element to the story that I didn’t even know it needed.
“This song embodies a place that I think, if we are honest with ourselves, we’ve all felt at some point in a relationship. The distance that feels heartbreaking, yet you’re also indifferent,” Pearce previously said of the song. She added to iHeartCountry: “When I wrote ‘We Don’t Fight Anymore,’ my cowriters — Shane McAnally and Pete Good — we were just trying to find something honest, as I feel like I always do. And in this moment, this was not what any of us were going through, but I think Shane threw out the idea, ‘We Don’t Fight Anymore,’ and it was just kind of off to the races at that point. I feel like all of us agreed that this is probably a point that people have been in, in a relationship. Maybe they’re still together, maybe they’re not, maybe they shouldn’t be together, maybe this song will help them. But you’ve always, at some point, I guess, experienced something like this, of just that feeling of indifference. Writing it was super special. I knew it was something that needed to be said, and I remember just really being inspired that day by the track that Pete built and just the really, really honest, almost uncomfortable, lyrics that we were writing.”
Pearce’s favorite lyric, she noted, is the idea that “‘I had a bad day, and you don’t know it, ‘cause you don’t ask, and I don’t show it.’ And that’s just, to me, the epitome of what this song is, which is just neither (of the people in the relationship) care.”
“We Don’t Fight Anymore” is Pearce’s first song to release from her next chapter of music, following 29: Written in Stone. The full-length project, which released in 2021, included “Diamondback,” “What He Didn’t Do,” “Dear Miss Loretta” — a stunning tribute to Loretta Lynn — “Next Girl,” “29” and other highlights. Pearce previously teased her next era of music with snippets of unreleased songs and photos from the recording studio. She’s also opened up about what listeners can expect to hear in the music she’s been working on since the 29 album.
“I think what fans have shown me is they want to see how I see the world,” Pearce previously said in a statement shared by her record label. “So, it’s been an interesting process of coming out of a season of my life that was so hard and transitioning into one that, yes, is so much fuller and richer, but also still a hard way to come out of. You don’t just blink your eyes one day and you’re healed, or you don’t just wake up one day and say, everything’s great, and yay! So, I think this one is just a chapter of my life that’s more navigating a new season, navigating to me, the best season of my life, honoring what I have been through, honoring that some of those things will live on with me as I carry through my life. And celebrating that I made it through in such a wonderful way.”
Listen to “We Don’t Fight Anymore” featuring Stapleton here: