**Crickets in the Distance: A Personal Ode to Caitlyn Smith’s “Do You Think About Me” (2016)**
By Kroes den Bock
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Among the small miracles I’ve witnessed in life is the way a country song can slip beneath your radar and, when found, feel like it was written solely for your private heartbreaks. It’s a sensation as bittersweet as any lost love, and it strikes me each time I revisit Caitlyn Smith’s 2016 ballad “Do You Think About Me.” It is a piece which, for reasons beyond my grasp, failed to stir mass consciousness or trouble radio charts. Yet, in its moonlit sorrow and trembling honesty, I found an anthem for the quiet aches that reside in all of us.
I should say: I was not well when I first heard it. My marriage, like a deck of gaudy playing cards, had scattered across a rough table—order and suit lost, nothing to build on. Friends say healing is linear. “You’ll get there,” they’d tell me, like I was a bus waiting for the last stop. But healing—mine, at least—would stall, loop backwards, or spiral out. Like a lonesome cricket’s song outside my window, heartbreak became the soundtrack of insomniac hours.
That sleepless night, scrolling through an obscure Spotify playlist titled “Country’s Forgotten Women,” I pressed play on what the algorithm offered. Caitlyn Smith’s voice, warm and haunted, filled my room:
*“Driving down these empty roads / Neon stains the leaves / Every mile, a memory, yeah / And I wonder if you think about me.”*
Smith, for those unfamiliar, is an under-sung gem of Nashville, the kind of artist whose songs others so often cover that her own voice goes unnoticed. With “Do You Think About Me,” she wrote herself a space in the canon of aching country. With only plaintive minor chords, a brush of steel guitar, and her evening-dark voice, she summoned a world where absence feels heavier than presence. The result is intimate, almost invasive—the listener called not to observe but confess.
What captured me most was the lyric—*“Every mile, a memory, yeah / And I wonder if you think about me.”* How she sketches the paradox of moving on: we leave, we drive, but memories, undiminished, keep their own mileage count. Isn’t this the sad humor of it all? That I could change cities, beds, jobs; change my hair, my hopes, my breakfast cereal—and still feel the ghost of my ex tapping me on the shoulder as I reached for the milk.
Let’s talk about that particular magic—how Smith’s song refuses grandiosity. It is not melodrama. She does not beg, does not curse, does not boast. Instead, her questions are small and quiet, barely voiced in the dark: “Do you think about me?” That simple chorus, almost a whisper, is more potent than any scream. In asking, she reveals how post-breakup pain is so rarely about anger or blame; more about wanting to know that the person who lit your world’s fuse is still, somewhere, sifting through the embers. It’s a lyric not for the angry but for the lost.
Maybe the reason this song didn’t flourish in the public ear is the same reason my friends could not help me. Our culture wants heartbreak with edges—empowerment, or at least closure. Smith offers neither. She promises no new lover, no reinvention, no dramatic revelation. The most she gives us is poignancy—the ache of wondering:
*“I drove past that old white church / Where we both said our first I love you’s…/ The light’s still on but we are gone / Just faded Sunday blues.”*
That lyric—simple, lucid, devastating—turns ordinary landmarks into memorial stones. The “old white church” could be any one of a hundred places coded to love lost. For me, it was a café in the West End, table five, the scent of nutmeg and scarves. Why do our brains do this, sanctifying every brick and curb touched by memory? Smith doesn’t answer, just marks it, lets it sting.
The arrangement, too, is crafted with a restraint bordering on reverence. There’s no swelling orchestra, no booming drums; only quiet guitar, brushed percussion, and the hush between verses—echoes that let Smith’s words echo as if inside my own chest. It is the sound of midnight doubt. Of backing down from calling, halfway through the dialing. It is an old, slow country song—an artifact of a time when heartbreak wasn’t cured in three minutes, nor documented for an audience.
For months, “Do You Think About Me” became my secret. I listened in the bath, in the car, on slow walks through old neighborhoods. Each time, Smith’s voice would coax my own memories loose—a voiceless roll call of what was lost and who I’d been. There’s psychoanalysis for this: the concept that art offers us not escape, but a way to confront what is unbearable to say aloud. By the chorus’s end—*“Tell me now, do you think about me?”*—I realized it was my own voice rising back at me, not Smith’s at all.
I suppose it’s no coincidence that “Do You Think About Me” didn’t chart, didn’t trend, didn’t soundtrack any viral TikToks. It’s a song that dwells in the background, shy and dark as regret. Maybe the best songs aren’t the ones we hear at the party, but the ones we find when the world is still, when hurt is fresh, and company is sparse. When the crickets in the distance are the only ones who seem to understand.
I’m better now. Not cured—healing is never linear, remember?—but living. When someone new asks who I am, I tell them stories, not laments. Still, on some late nights, I find myself replaying Caitlyn Smith’s lament, letting her voice ask the melancholy questions I’ve half-forgotten to ask myself.
Would I recommend it to you? Only if you’re ready—for honesty without answers, for the knowledge that some sadness endures, and for the comfort that even uncelebrated songs can keep us company on the lonesome road out of love. Caitlyn Smith may not have made millions with “Do You Think About Me,” but to those of us who know it, she offered something better: the solace of not being alone in our nocturnal remembering.
*Kroes den Bock*