Songfacts®:

• On "What If We Don't" Ashley McBryde reflects on the power of romantic choices made and choices forfeited. She ponders the potential outcomes of two people deciding whether to risk a friendship by acting on deeper feelings. "It's about the leaps of faith that you do or don't take and having to learn to live with those consequences either way," said McBryde.
• Ashley McBryde co-wrote the song with Terri Jo Box and Randall Clay on July 8, 2015, around a metal patio table on the brick-and-mortar back porch of a duplex Box rented in Nashville's Belle Meade district. The trio addressed frustrations they were both experiencing in their love lives - they'd gotten involved with friends who turned out to be less-than-ideal partners. "Ashley and I were both in situationships, which we both pretty much stayed in back then," Box recalled to Billboard.
• McBryde first released "What If We Don't" on her 2016 indie EP Jalopies & Expensive Guitars, but the song didn't come out quite the way she imagined, and it didn't get much exposure. Tragedy struck when co-writer Randall Clay died in October 2018 from pneumonia in Pensacola, Florida, as a hurricane descended upon the city.
• In 2025, as she prepped for her fifth album, Wild, McBryde began inserting "What If We Don't" into her live set, working it up with her road band, Deadhorse, while out supporting Cody Johnson. "We were trying out new arrangements of a song that has been around a long time in front of 20,000 people a night," she told Billboard. "What a great barometer to go, 'Well, that worked' or 'Well, that didn't work.'"
• McBryde enlisted Brothers Osborne guitarist John Osborne to produce the Wild album, and they made a new recording of "What If We Don't" at his Pinebox Studio on March 6, 2025 that they included on the track list. Osborne was very hands-on. "John Osborne could go around to every instrument and show what he wanted to hear," Terri Jo Box said. "He could get behind the drums, and then he played the guitar, and he [was] just cool and laid back about everything. He really let Ashley be Ashley."
• The music video, directed by Brandon Campbell, is built roughly around the loss of McBryde's high school friend in a car accident, and is framed as a flashback during an EMDR therapy session. The narrative depicts a story of young love and friendship. Notably, the central girl has a boyfriend but expresses some sexual tension with McBryde's character.
  
  "That's definitely by design, to leave that up to the viewer who the young person is most interested in because at that time, especially at that age group, you're not sure," McBryde told Billboard. "A lot of the times you're like, 'Oh my gosh, I really enjoy hanging out with these two, and I can't tell exactly.'"
  
  The video builds on several different friendships and incorporates the harder edge McBryde always envisioned for the song.
• By the time the song finally arrived at country radio on January 22, 2026, it had taken the long way around: 10 years, a handful of heartbreaks, and a great deal of lived experience. "I may have had a heartache or two when I wrote it," McBryde reflected, "but I didn't have the tools to fully process everything that I was packing into that until now."