During the acoustic set, the arena darkened.
I sat on a stool at the end of the runway with my guitar across my lap. The rhinestone pants had cut off circulation to most of my internal organs, but they sparkled beautifully under the spotlights, which was apparently the exchange rate.
“This next song,” I said, “is about leaving home.”
The cheering softened.
“It’s also about realizing that leaving a place doesn’t mean it leaves you.”
Someone in the front row shouted, “WE LOVE YOU, SAVANNAH!”
“I love you too,” I said automatically.
The crowd screamed.
My smile stayed in place.
I started the song.
It was one of the quieter tracks from my second album, the one Ellie Parker would tell me a year later had carried her through a bad winter.
That night in Dallas, I did not know Ellie existed.
I only knew the song had been written in an apartment with broken air-conditioning after I had called my mother and lied about how well Nashville was going. I knew the label had wanted a larger chorus. I knew Richard Greene had suggested changingone line because women tested better when they sounded nostalgic but not resentful.
I had kept the line.
It was still my favorite.
Halfway through the second verse, I saw a woman near the front holding a sign.
THIS SONG GOT ME HOME.
She was crying.
Not loudly. Not in a way meant to be noticed.
She simply held the sign against her chest and sang every word.
Something inside me shifted.
The crowd disappeared for one moment.
The cameras. The arena. The screens showing my face forty feet high.
It was just a song moving from one person to another.
That part never got old.
That part was still mine.
By the final chorus, the entire arena was singing.
I let them carry the last line.
Their voices rose around me, imperfect and enormous.
For a few seconds, I felt less alone than any person in the world.
