**“The Heart Knows” by Cale Tyson: A Quiet Compass for Our Wandering Souls**
By Kroes den Bock
If you spend enough time shuffling through the vast back roads of the country music landscape between 2014 and 2024, you’ll find yourself stumbling over more than a handful of songs adored by tiny cults and ignored by the streaming masses. There is a loneliness, and yet a quiet kinship, in loving something you suspect hardly anyone else knows. Sometimes, a lonely song is more effective as a salve for loneliness than all the chart-toppers combined.
Cale Tyson, a Fort Worth native with a voice as cracked and warm as late sunshine on barbed wire, released a song in 2017 called “The Heart Knows.” Tucked away on his gorgeously underrated album *Careless Soul,* the track never climbed billboards or spawned TikTok trends. But those who know, know.
I came to “The Heart Knows” at a time when I, too, felt like an outsider in my own story. Lost love, the gnawing sense that I might never “get over myself,” and—perhaps worst of all—a bone-deep fear that, in the end, no one really does know or see you. Tyson sings that for us: “The heart knows what the mind mistakes / And it keeps on breaking / Whenever it aches.” I remember pausing, that lyric thudding against my chest like a stone. How many times had I been talked out of my grief? How many times had I tried to “move on” with the stubborn conviction of someone packing up before the pain has had its say?
There is a trembling gentleness in the way Tyson presents heartbreak. It’s not grandiose. It’s not vindictive. It’s just…honest. Minimal and mournful, but not without grace. He croons:
> “I’ve heard it before
> When you love, there’s a cost
> Still my heart keeps a score
> For everything lost.”
He doesn’t try to dress up the wound or moralize. The heart, it turns out, is neither wise nor foolish—it just *is.* Its knowing is simple and relentless. Lying awake at two in the morning after my third consecutive failed relationship, wondering if maybe the problem was simply *me*, I understood at last: the ache wasn’t there to be solved. It was there to be honored.
“The Heart Knows” is a song for those moments—the dark spaces when your friends have gone home and you’re left with only the ticking need in your chest. Tyson’s ragged vocals are the whispered prayers you try not to pray. The pedal steel guitar that weeps in the background is a soundtrack for every time you wanted to call someone you shouldn’t, just to hear their voice pretend it never mattered. But you know it did. As he sings it, “We can forgive, but we can’t forget / The heart remembers all it regrets.”
Most American country songs about heartbreak either go for the whiskey or the wild defiance. Very few park themselves in uncertainty like this—few allow for the possibility that “moving on” might sometimes be a polite fiction the mind invents, but the body, the soul, the battered heart, know better.
Like many of you, I was trained in the church of self-improvement. Pull yourself up. Dust yourself off. Romanticize growth as a tonic and treat love as a lesson to learn or a game to win. But “The Heart Knows” doesn’t instruct, it *witnesses*. It doesn’t urge me to be better, or braver, or even happier. Instead, it sits with me on the back porch of memory, staring out over a field of what-ifs and letting the silence do the talking. It is the friend who nods when you swear you’re fine but knows, of course, that you aren’t.
A story: The summer my father died, the world went on as if nothing had changed. Trucks rumbled down old highways. My neighbors mowed their lawns. Instagram scrolled ever upward. But I felt frozen inside every moment. For weeks—months—my partner at the time tried to draw me out, talking me through therapy scripts, offering distractions. But it was only alone, headphones pressed tight to my ears, that I found solace in Cale’s understated croon:
> “Wherever you run,
> Wherever you go,
> The heart will follow slowly /
> Bruised but never hollow.”
I wept out of sadness, yes, but also relief. I didn’t have to *do* anything but let the ache exist. We all want closure, some sweet narrative punctuation that allows us to declare, “The end.” But life isn’t so obliging. The heart, Tyson tells us, doesn’t close so neatly. Sometimes, its knowing is an open wound and, in that wound, we are at our realest.
That’s what “The Heart Knows” gave to me. Not hope, exactly, but recognition. Permission to be unfinished.
Now, when I stumble, when my ambitions collapse and my old anxieties stalk my better instincts, I remember Tyson’s refrain: “The heart knows what the mind mistakes.” It strikes me that most of my worst errors—my sabotaged romances, the nights spent doom-scrolling, the apologies never given—didn’t come from being too emotional, as I’d always been taught, but from trying not to feel at all. The mind mistakes the heart’s ache for a problem to solve, instead of a companion for the journey.
Cale Tyson’s “The Heart Knows” may never become a jukebox staple or the soundtrack to your local bar. But maybe that’s as it should be. It is a song for the quietly breaking—to console, never to cure. To honor the ache, befriend the ache, and know the ache is permanent, but so too is the unspoken kinship with anyone quietly listening beside you in the dark.
So here’s to the songs that never made it—may they find the broken among us, and may the heart, in all its knowing, be recognized at last.
Kroes den Bock