Ashley McBryde Will Celebrate 900th Day of Sobriety on Thanksgiving: 'It's Got a Holiday Built in' (Exclusive)

Ashley McBryde is feeling proud — with good reason.

The 41-year-old country star attended and performed at the 2024 CMA Awards at Nashville’s Bridgestone Arena on Nov. 19, just over a week before marking the milestone in her sobriety journey.

“It’s great,” McBryde tells PEOPLE of her progress on the red carpet ahead of the awards show. “I was adding up — I want to celebrate my 900th day of sobriety and I said, ‘That’s a milestone! You should celebrate it.’ I looked, and it’s Thanksgiving, so there’s a holiday built into this time.”

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Ashley McBryde in November 2024.

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The Grammy winner added: “It’s a huge milestone and one of the most important changes I’ve ever made.”

At the 2024 CMA Awards, McBryde sang “Help Me Make It Through the Night” in tribute to the late Kris Kristofferson, who died in September at age 88. She was also nominated for female singer of the year.

McBryde quit drinking alcohol in June 2022, but decided to keep her sobriety a secret for a while before sharing the process with the public.

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Ashley McBryde in November 2024.

Theo Wargo/Getty

“I decided not to talk about it at all for at least a year,” she told PEOPLE in November 2023, “because what I didn’t need was people on social media saying, ‘Ashley McBryde swears off alcohol!’ All people will do is just wait for you to screw up, and I found that really irritating me. I didn’t do it for social media.”

The transition to sobriety made McBryde “the best I’ve felt, the best I’ve looked,” she said at the time, adding that it also changed her “voice.”

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Ashley McBryde in November 2024.

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“If you had told me 10 years ago, you think you love your voice? You should hear it without drinking, because for me drinking goes with smoking,” she continued.

The “Willow” singer also opened up about re-educating herself after quitting drinking. “I’m still going to run into a situation where I’m like, oh, I’d be drinking because of this. And I go ahead and sit with that feeling and say, OK, you had a great performance or you had a great interview, or you had a great interaction, or anything,” she said. “Why on earth would you punish yourself for that?”

“It takes a while to realize it’s happening,” McBryde added. “Literally, it was punishing myself for doing good things. And when I stopped doing that, the good things got better.”

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Source: HIS Education