SJ McDonald knows that country music boils down to three chords and the truth. Admittedly, though, many of the truths she’s shared recently pack a barn-burning punch with a healthy dose of 90s country flair.
As she closes the book on 2025, McDonald is opening a new one with her new EP, Sweet at First. Still present are the fantastic up-tempos, but now, McDonald is peeling back the curtain, or quilt, if you will, with heavier songs. “The Quilt” was spawned from losing her publishing deal, and “Wasn’t a Woman,” a career-defining song, sees the Virginia native penning a letter of understand towards the hardships that women can face.
We caught up with McDonald to talk all about Sweet at First, big career moves and more new music on the way!
Pro Country: Your new EP, Sweet at First, is your first EP release in five years. Why did you feel it was the right time to come back with a package of songs?
SJ McDonald: It had been so much time. My plan had always been to wrap the songs I released in 2023 and 2024 into an EP. Life got in the way, and it didn’t happen. I always had the intention to record more music and make a project out of them, but I didn’t have enough money. By the time I did, the time to put out an EP with songs like “Break a Cowboy,” “Who Hurt You” and “Rosemary” out had passed. I picked up and started over again.
PC: The EP title, “Sweet at First,” comes from a line in “Wild Women.” How did you feel that phrase summarized the EP, and why did you feel it was the right title?
SJ: I love when the title for a project comes from a song, even if it’s not necessarily one of the song titles. The two songs we singled out, “Wild Women” and “Honky Tonk Pie,” were very “sweet at first.” They’re powerful songs: “Wild Women” is about the women in my life, and “Honky Tonk Pie” is about working hard for a dream. Those are the “sweet” part. I feel that the two new songs, “The Quilt” and “Wasn’t a Woman” are the “at first” part. It summarizes the project as a whole, in that you can have so many great, empowering songs, but you can also have struggles in your life that make you think “is this a part of my quilt?” and you can have thoughts in your brain as a woman like “hey, it’s scary out here being a girl.”
PC: You released a music video for “Wild Women” about a month ago. How much fun was it to film the video and breathe that life into the song?
SJ: Oh my gosh, it was a dream! I would recommend to anybody, even if you’re not a singer, to get your whole family together and do a photoshoot or video with them. That is like a time capsule for our family. I got some messages from friends saying that the video inspired them to reach back out to family or spend more time with them. That’s what I wanted to do with it. The response has been great in my home town, specifically. People have been commenting “I never thought your grandma would be in a music video, but here we are!” [laughs].
PC: The last time we talked, you’d just released “Honky Tonk Pie,” which is a fantastic, barn burner of a song. How much have you enjoyed bringing new, up-tempo songs like “Honky Tonk Pie” and “Wild Women” to the live setting?
SJ: It’s been so fun! As a fan of country music and as a performer, the live experience is so important to me. I love a slow, break-your-heart song, but when I get on stage, I also want to have a crap ton of barn burners that make people sing along. Moments for deep songs like “The Quilt” are so important, but if you can’t follow those songs up with something more fun, for me, that’s a problem.
Those are two songs I went back in my catalog for. I wrote “Honky Tonk Pie” in 2021, and I wrote “Wild Women” in 2023. I stumbled on those songs, remembered them and knew it was time to put them out. To see people connecting to them is really cool.
PC: “The Quilt” is a great newly-released song that you co-wrote with Brittany Moore and Tori Tullier. Can you take us in the room and talk about how the song came together?
SJ: I wrote “The Quilt” the day I lost my first publishing deal. I went into a meeting in September of 2024 with my then-publisher, expecting it to be a regular meeting. I was told that they weren’t picking up the options in my contract, and at the end of the year, I’d be out of there.
I walked into my co-write that day, that luckily happened to be booked with Brittany and Tori. I was sobbing. I thought my life was over. I’d worked so hard to get to that goal. After all the crying about it, Brittany looked at me and said, “you like quilts, SJ. Is there any story we can find around this with quilts?” We all talked about it, and kept throwing out things like “patches,” “sewing things together” and how quilts are old, but they hold up and how they take a long time to make. I realized it was a metaphor for my life and what I was going through.
The magic of Brittany Moore and Tori Tullier, and me, I like to think, somehow patched all those words together into “love is the patches, life is the quilt.” That’s when a lightbulb goes off in a songwriter’s brain, and then it’s off to the damn races.
We wrote it, I cried through it, and I didn’t get to record it until August of this year. I held onto it for a while and hadn’t played it too much. I felt like I needed to share that part of my story.
PC: The last time we talked, you mentioned that around the same time you lost your publishing deal, you’d just decided to stop performing on Broadway in Nashville. What is it like to have the peak and valley of leaving Broadway and losing a publishing deal happen at the same time?
SJ: It was the craziest, scariest moment of my career thus far. I had decided to leave Broadway a few weeks before I lost my publishing deal. I got told I was getting let go from my deal the day before I was supposed to quit Broadway.
I was walking into Bongo Java in East Nashville the day after losing my deal, and I was wrestling with the idea of keeping Broadway or not. As I walked up to the coffee shop, there was a homeless man singing “I’m going through changes.” I didn’t know it was an Ozzy song, I thought it was a sign from God to me to continue with my choices and to put myself through changes [laughs]. Something about that homeless man singing that made me stick to my decision and push myself. I’m so glad I did, because this year has been the best year yet.
PC: “Wasn’t a Woman” is our favorite song on Sweet at First, and is a song you wrote with Averie Bielski and Brittany Moore. How important is that song to you and having that powerful message close the EP?
SJ: I am so proud of that song. It’s so important to me, because it’s important to talk about the hard stuff. I haven’t been so great about doing that with my music, because I’m such a barn burner, up-tempo, happy girl. There’s a line in that song: “I wouldn’t keep something I don’t know how to use in my front pocket;” that could be about a gun if you wanted it to be, it could be a pocketknife, or it could be pepper spray. For me, it was about a switchblade pocketknife that I kept in my front pocket for years. If somebody had tried to rob me on Broadway, I wouldn’t have known what to do, but I kept it there, because in my brain, I thought it would protect me. Being a girl in a city is scary, and I wanted other women to know that they’re not alone in having those thoughts, because being a woman is also badass.
PC: To that point, there were so many fellow, great female artists that rallied around the release of Sweet at First on social media, like Mae Estes, Erin Enderlin, Emily Ann Roberts, Tigirlily Gold and so many more. What has the camaraderie and support from your fellow female artists meant to you as you’ve released the EP?
SJ: The camaraderie from those women in country proves to me that everything they say about women hating each other is wrong. I have felt nothing but support from day one from every girl that I’ve come across in the industry. Seeing bigger artists like those, who have had so much more success than me so far, be so supportive of me, no matter how tiny my Spotify listeners or Instagram followings are, reminds me that real recognizes real. It reminds me that when I get to that level, I want to do the same thing for the women that are coming up. It’s been really cool to get close to other women that are artists, because we’re all going through the same things. Talking to Mae and Emily Ann, specifically, makes me realize that I’m not crazy for wearing myself thin for this dream.
PC: On social media, you said “if you don’t know me, now you do,” when talking about Sweet at First. That said, what do you hope listeners take away from the EP after listening all the way through?
SJ: I hope they take away that I’m an ol’ hard working girl that has the same joys and struggles as so many other women. I’m just looking for friends that feel the same. Whether it’s the happy moments or the hard moments, I want to find community through this music.
PC: With Sweet at First now released, what do you have planned for 2026?
SJ: If you’ve seen my Instagram, I did this stupid, silly cooking video series. I had such great plans to be an A-plus baker, but it turns out, I don’t have enough patience for that [laughs]. I’ve got a few episodes in the tank for that, and it’s going to be madness of laughing at me while talking about music and pies.
On top of that, on the day we released Sweet at First, we did a content shoot for music coming out in January. I have a bunch of songs in the can for next year, and we are going to put ‘em out! My fans have been so incredibly supportive of me, especially when it would be three months between releases. Now, I’m ready to feed the fans.
PC: Is there anything you’d like to add?
SJ: Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays to everyone!
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