Recording an album is difficult enough on its own, but Mickey Guyton made her full-length studio debut, Remember Her Name, while simultaneously at work on another creative process: She was pregnant with her first child, a son named Grayson.
“Pregnancy wasn’t in the plan!” Mickey admits during a recent CMT interview, adding that “God gives you exactly what you need at that exact moment.”
For Mickey, becoming a mom meant focusing less on the criticism and pressure she faced from the country music industry, not only as a new artist, but also as a Black woman. “I know that I needed this beautiful boy to take my mind off the industry’s pressure and put that energy into this precious human,” she explains.
In addition, the pregnancy brought logistical challenges to the album-making process. “Recording and singing with a baby in your belly is a lot!” the singer goes on to say. “When I first found out that I was pregnant, the first trimester was the hardest for recording.”
Early pregnancy symptoms like nausea made it difficult for Mickey to predict when she’d be able to work, and later on, as the baby grew, it became physically difficult for her to sing.
“Then, in the final trimester, I had to learn how to sing with a six-pound baby in my belly. While recording the song ‘All American,’ for instance, there was no room for my diaphragm, so I had to wait for certain times of the day to record,” she recounts. “If I had just eaten, I literally couldn’t sing ‘All American,’ because my voice couldn’t hit those notes…”
Also on the track list of Remember Her Name are songs like “Black Like Me” and “What Are You Gonna Tell Her?”
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