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

Ashley McBryde is feeling proud — for 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 out from marking an achievement in her sobriety journey.

“It’s awesome,” McBryde tells PEOPLE of her progress on the red carpet ahead of the awards show. “I was adding up — I want to celebrate on the 900th day of being sober, and I was like, ‘That’s a milestone! You should celebrate that.’ I looked, and it’s Thanksgiving Day, so it’s got a holiday built in this time.”

The Grammy winner added, “That is quite a milestone, and it’s 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 vocalist of the year.

McBryde quit drinking alcohol in June 2022, but she chose to keep her sobriety private for some time before sharing the process with the public.

“I decided that I wasn’t gonna talk about it at all until at least a year,” she told PEOPLE in November 2023, “because what I didn’t need was people on social media being like, ‘Ashley McBryde swears off alcohol!’ All people are gonna do is just wait for you to screw up, and that’s really annoying. I did it for me. I didn’t do it for social media.”

The shift to sobriety led McBryde to “the best I’ve felt, the best I’ve looked,” she said at the time, adding that her “voice” also changed as a result.

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

The “Willow” singer also opened up about re-educating herself after she quit drinking alcohol. “I’ll still encounter a situation where I’ll be like, oh, normally I would drink about this. And I go ahead and sit with that feeling and I’m like, OK, you had a great show or you had a great interview, or you had a great interaction, or whatever,” she said. “Why on earth would you punish yourself for that?”

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