Songfacts®:

• After a seven-year break from releasing original material, country singer Sara Evans returned with Unbroke, a collection of vulnerable songs inspired by her rocky relationship with football player turned radio personality Jay Barker. The lead single, "Pride," details the abuse Evans' endured during their marriage from 2008 until she filed for divorce in 2021.
  
  Despite her intention to leave, which she shares in the song, the singer reconciled with her husband after he committed to individual therapy and marriage counseling. Evans knows her decision to stay will be unpopular with fans - especially since Barker made headlines in 2022 for allegedly attempting to hit the vehicle Evans was riding in - but hopes they'll keep an open mind about her choice.
  
  "This is my marriage. It's my situation. I'm married to a wonderful man who did imperfect things. I'm a great person who is also imperfect. That was our choice to get better and heal. No one should make their decisions based on me," she told People in a 2024 interview. "This is very scary because, again, people are going to be mad. I hope that most people will give me the benefit of the doubt and give Jay the benefit of the doubt and just take me at my word that this is the right decision for me."
• The song feels intimate and personal because Evans sings it in a first person point of view. After she reconciled with Barker, she offered to rewrite it from a third-person perspective to take some of the heat off of her husband. He refused and encouraged her to share her story however she saw fit.
  
  "He said, 'Absolutely not. Hell no. You're singing that song just as you wrote it, because that's your story and that's your truth,'" she said. "He was like, 'You're not changing anything about that song. That song is the best song you've ever written.' He's super proud of it."
• When Barker was arrested, he was initially charged with aggravated assault with a deadly weapon, but Evans claims it was all a big misunderstanding. She doesn't believe he was actually trying to hit the car on purpose and thinks her daughter, who was fighting with Barker prior to the incident and called the police, was confused about what she witnessed.
  
  "I just felt so ashamed and so stupid, and my child was so mad. But you know that she was standing there thinking, 'He's about to hit my mom with a truck.' I don't know how close he got honestly, and I don't know what it looks like to her. But I heard her scream so loud," Evans explained on the first episode of her podcast, Diving In Deep With Sara Evans. "I really did not think that he was trying to hit our car. I think he was trying to back up as fast as he could to see who I was in the car with, to see if I was with another man."
• Evans wrote this with fellow singer-songwriters Madi Diaz ("Resentment," "All Summer") and Sean McConnell ("Wine, Beer, Whiskey," "Learned To Lie"). Evans had a difficult time trying to share her story during the songwriting session.
  
  "I couldn't talk about anything without crying," she told Billboard. "Madi had to sing our work demo because I couldn't sing it, because it is so heavy. A lot of people deal with that, whether it's alcohol or drug abuse and anything like that causes problems in a family and marriage."
• Evans, whose first marriage to Craig Schelske ended in divorce, told People she got caught up in toxic relationships because she'd spent her life trying to earn the love of an emotionally unavailable father, which led to unhealthy behaviors in her marriages.
  
  "A lack of attention from men was all I'd ever known. If Jay was jealous, that meant he was obsessed with me, which meant he loved me," she explained. "I was so madly in love with him, and still am, that it took me forever to tell people. I was in denial. I thought, 'I can change it. I can manage his behavior. I can just make sure that nothing ever upsets him.'"
  
  But the singer sensed something wasn't right with their dynamic and her fears were confirmed after reading a number of books about toxic relationships, which led to the couple's initial split.
  
  "That's when I started to realize, 'I am in a toxic relationship, and I don't deserve this,'" she continued. "I shouldn't be scared to say what I want to say or do what I want to do."
• The music video, directed by Peter Zavadil, stars the singer's 19-year-old daughter Audrey Evans as an abused woman who works at a strip club. The clip opens with her using makeup to cover a bruise under her eye before she heads out on stage, where she sees an all-too-familiar sight in the crowd - an aggressive man lashing out at his tearful girlfriend. By the end of the video, Audrey stands up to the guy, allowing his girlfriend to get away.
  
  Zavadil first worked with Sara Evans back in 2000 when he directed the video for her hit single "Born To Fly," which earned the director his first win for the Country Music Association Video of the Year.
• Barker doesn't shy away from the video, which alludes to his own poor behavior. "He's watched it with me many, many times. We show it to people when they come over, and my heart always... Oh, I didn't know I was going to cry," Evans confessed to People.
  
  "People are going to judge me. 'Why do you feel sorry for him?' But I know what he's feeling - he's feeling shame. But he's also being brave and being like, 'Yeah, that's the truth. I did that.'"
• Evans produced Unbroke with Jeff Trott, who also co-wrote the album's track "21 Days." Trott has a big list of songwriting and producing credits, but he's best known for his work with Sheryl Crow as her longtime guitarist and co-writer on hits like "My Favorite Mistake," "If It Makes You Happy" and "Everyday Is A Winding Road," among others.
• While Evans hadn't released an album of original material since 2017's Words, she did issue Copy That in 2020, a collection of covers. The lead single was her take on Yvonne Elliman's "If I Can't Have You" from Saturday Night Fever.
• Evans wrote this in the weeks following the car incident, but she took most of her inspiration from a problematic thread that ran throughout her marriage. She sings of her husband drinking whiskey and wine but "the only thing that you can't swallow is your pride."
  
  She told Billboard in 2024: "I kept saying, 'It's just his pride. If he could get around that and start admitting the truth of what's really going on behind the scenes in our marriage, then we would be fine.' My kids never knew about it. They never saw anything. They never even heard him raise his voice."