Nashville country singer Karen Waldrup says her Christian faith, daily scripture reading, and a short list of trusted friends carried her through the collapse of her marriage in the fall of 2025.
Waldrup, a Louisiana native who finished as a top-five finalist on Season 25 of NBC's "The Voice," opened up to Fox News Digital about the darkest stretch of her personal life, and how she channeled that grief into a song she now calls one of the best she has ever recorded.
The interview comes months after Waldrup publicly confirmed her divorce in a February Facebook post, writing that she had taken time to "process it privately" before sharing the news. She described the fall of 2025 as a period of deep vulnerability, one she survived by pulling her Bible into bed with her every night and reading scripture first thing each morning.
Waldrup told Fox News Digital that the day she tracked the vocal for "Keeping the Faith" was the worst she has ever experienced in a recording studio. She did not know whether anything usable would come out of the session.
"And the day that I tracked that song was a tough day. It was the toughest day that I've ever been in the studio. And I didn't know if it was even going to come out good because I felt so broken."
She said the brokenness ended up serving the song. Listeners can hear the desperation in her voice, she believes, a quality no amount of polish could have manufactured.
"But I think in the end, the song came out great because of the brokenness. I think you can kind of hear it in the vocal, the desperation of keeping the faith and saying, 'Hey, you know what, no matter what goes on, you got to get back up and go, you got it. Pick it up. You got to keep the faith.'"
Waldrup also pointed to a lyric in the song's bridge, "There's a reason I'm still standing here stronger than I ever knew", as a line that took on new weight after her marriage ended. She said the experience of losing a lifelong dream of marriage is heartbreaking, but she genuinely believes people come out of it stronger.
Divorce has become a recurring chapter in country music circles. Bunnie Xo recently described her own devastation following her split from Jelly Roll, a reminder that even artists who seem to have it all can find their personal lives unraveling in public.
Waldrup described a deliberate strategy for protecting her mental and spiritual health during the worst of the crisis. She made a list of six confidants, God plus five people, whom she felt she could talk to without being made to feel worse.
"Sometimes when you're going through something like a divorce, everyone has their opinions. Everyone has all these different things that people want to say. And so I found that was a really helpful thing."
She said she tried to limit her conversations about the divorce to those five people, filtering out the noise of well-meaning but unhelpful advice. The discipline helped her stay grounded while she continued working on new music.
Her faith anchored everything. Waldrup said she was "sleeping with my Bible every single night, in the bed with me at night," waking up each morning and opening scripture before doing anything else. She called her faith "the foundation of what got me through that."
That kind of raw honesty is rare in the entertainment world, where public divorces often play out through lawyers and publicists. The Jelly Roll and Bunnie XO split surprised fans partly because the couple handled their public communications with unexpected warmth, a contrast to the acrimony that typically dominates celebrity breakups.
Waldrup said she drew strength from thinking about artists who kept performing through personal tragedy. She named Dolly Parton and Reba McEntire as examples of women who got back on stage after losing loved ones or facing family emergencies.
"I look at people like Dolly Parton or Reba [McEntire], and I think about how many times they had somebody pass away, and they had to get back up on stage, or they had their mom in the hospital or something, and they had to go play a show."
For Waldrup, the lesson was simple: the work does not stop because your life falls apart. She had a record to finish, and she finished it.
Waldrup is a BMI songwriter, a member of both the Recording Academy and the Country Music Association, and a winner of 12 Nashville Industry Music Awards. She has released seven studio albums and more than 50 songs worldwide, performing in over 15 countries. Her single "Just in Case" was released on Friday, September 18.
High-profile divorces continue to dominate headlines across the entertainment and business worlds. A New Jersey hedge-fund divorce case recently drew attention for its sheer bitterness, a stark contrast to Waldrup's quieter, faith-centered approach to ending a marriage.
Waldrup framed her music career in explicitly spiritual terms. She told Fox News Digital she believes God gave her a voice for a reason, and that her job is not to make herself important but to do His work.
"I don't really need to be important. All I need to do is do God's work.... He gave me this voice. And we're talking about faith, we're talking about music, we're talking about joy, we're talking about friendship, and about love, or the lack thereof."
She said she sees part of her purpose as inspiring others, and that she does not make her musical experience "all about me." Every show, every moment, every song is a gift, she said.
When she announced her divorce publicly on her Facebook page in February, Waldrup kept the statement brief and gracious. She asked for kindness, expressed gratitude for the support around her, and said she was ready to move forward.
The timeline of the Jelly Roll divorce filing showed how quickly personal pain can become public property for artists in the spotlight. Waldrup chose a different path, processing her grief privately before sharing it on her own terms, through her own music.
In a culture that treats faith as something to outgrow and marriage as something to discard, a woman who pulled her Bible into bed and kept singing deserves more than a headline. She deserves a listen.