Five years earlier
The first time someone described me as wholesome, I was eating cold pizza in a conference room at ten in the morning.
I had one foot tucked beneath me, cheese stuck to my thumb, and a bruise on my knee from falling off a mechanical bull at a radio-station party the night before.
“Wholesome,” Richard Greene repeated.
He said it with great confidence, as though the word had arrived from a laboratory after several months of testing.
I looked down at the pizza.
“Is there a less upsetting option?”
Across the table, Sophie Grant clicked to the next slide.
A photograph of me appeared on the screen.
I was standing in a field at sunset, wearing boots, a white dress, and an expression of surprised joy. The image had been taken for my first album campaign, though the field waslocated twenty minutes outside Nashville and smelled strongly of fertilizer.
Large words appeared beside my face.
AUTHENTIC. WARM. RELATABLE.
Underneath them:
THE GIRL NEXT DOOR WITH A VOICE BUILT FOR STADIUMS.
I stared at it.
“Which door?”
Richard smiled patiently.
“The point is that people feel like they know you.”
“They don’t.”
“That’s marketing,” Sophie said.
Rachel Donovan sat beside me with a legal pad, a black coffee, and the expression of a woman who had already decided several people in the room were wasting her time.
“Can we discuss what this actually means?” she asked.
Richard folded his hands on the table.
“It means the early numbers are strong.”
“How strong?” I asked.
“Very.”
“Is that stronger than good?”
“It’s significantly stronger than good.”
“Do I get a chart?”
Sophie clicked again.
