The Long Way to Tacoma

**Walking Ghosts: A Deep-Dive into Caitlyn Smith’s “Tacoma”**
*By Kroes den Bock*

Some years ago, I spent an entire autumn in the throes of a kind of existential drift—a faceless job, a city that wasn’t really mine, a string of bruised relationships trailing behind me like storm clouds. It was during this season, back in 2015, that I stumbled across a song that pressed itself like a thumbprint right into the wax of my days: Caitlyn Smith’s “Tacoma.”

You might blink, and in your mind, you see Eric Church gazing out the window of a brokedown Chevy, the original version glimmering along the edge of mainstream country, but Smith—the co-writer and overlooked siren—recorded her own version in 2015 on her *Starfire* EP, and years later on the *Starfire* album. Smith’s “Tacoma” was never corralled into the country radio enclaves, never neatly packaged for pop-country playlists, yet it remains one of those rare songs that gets into your skin and stays there, quietly haunting the long miles between heartbreak and self-forgiveness.

*”A suitcase and an old guitar / And a one-way ride to the other side of blue”*

That line was the first to lodge itself in me—simple, but so acutely painful. There’s something about country songwriting, at its best, that distills the complexities of leaving, of letting go, into imagery so plain you could nearly miss it. In “Tacoma,” Smith doesn’t bother gilding the pain; it’s raw, unadorned, and devastatingly honest.

**Leaving Isn’t Always Liberation**

We talk these days, ceaselessly, about breaking free—quit the job, leave the town, dump the guy, burn the bridges. And yet, what Caitlyn Smith understands, and what “Tacoma” breathes, is that leaving doesn’t always feel like liberation. Sometimes it feels like slow death, like driving with the ghost of your former life right beside you in the passenger seat. The first time I listened to “Tacoma,” I was pacing the cracked tiles of my kitchen, half-drunk on cheap wine, half-remembering someone I wasn’t ready to forget. Smith’s voice, frayed and unguarded, pierced the small self-deceptions I’d constructed to survive.

*”Halfway there, I thought I saw your ghost / Road forks left, but my mind won’t let you go”*

The lyric stares down the phantom pains of loss, those midnight moments when you make it as far as Tacoma, or Albuquerque, or just the rearview of wherever you started. Smith’s song rides the line between physical escape and emotional paralysis. We move, we run, but our minds loop back, again and again, to the places and people we swore to leave behind.

**The Personal Becomes Universal**

There are those who’ll say that a song is just a song. But those people haven’t felt a Caitlyn Smith heartbreak. My own wounds, ragged from years of dissolving and rebuilding, found a companion in “Tacoma.” I think of my grandfather on the porch, his quiet sadness when my grandmother left. I think of my teenage self, swallowing loss in gas station bathrooms, radio static humming a sad accompaniment. Smith’s lines:

*”Guess the hardest part / Of movin’ on / Is never looking back”*

It isn’t true, of course. We look back every mile. That’s what makes “Tacoma” so tightly wound around my spine—it refuses the easy story. It knows that even a new face of the world doesn’t rub out the bruises of the heart. If anything, it amplifies them.

**Smith’s Unmistakable Voice**

Let’s not overlook Smith herself, whose voice has the texture of homesickness and first frost. There’s a generous ache there, a full-throated wail cresting over the chord changes, but also an artistry that is rare in mainstream country. She weaves a subtle gospel-folk warmth through her phrasing, each word tumbling rough and real, as though she’s still living every syllable. Nowhere is this more tender than in the song’s nearly whispered bridge:

*”There’s a million ways a goodbye can go wrong / But I took the long way to Tacoma”*

I sometimes think about the “long way”—about how many of us, by design or error, stretch our own suffering, adding detours and delays on the road to healing. In my own life, what felt like bold departures were often just a different form of staying stuck: new cities, same ghosts. Smith’s “Tacoma” gives voice to that strange comfort of pain, the security we find in our old wounds, the familiar ache of “what if.”

**To Those Who Are Leaving**

I won’t pretend that “Tacoma” will solve your bruised heart or my own. But there is healing, sometimes, in the honest witness of someone else’s longing. The song struck me hardest on evenings spent standing in my dust-choked living room, gazing east toward a city I no longer recognized, humming along with Smith as the neon flickered outside. I wonder if you, reader, have your own Tacoma—a place that marks the boundary between what you once felt for someone (or something, or yourself), and what you hope you might someday feel again.

Smith makes it clear: the road out is rarely easy, and rarely final. To listen to “Tacoma” is to admit, with a strange relief, that you’re not alone in not being finished yet. Healing isn’t a place on a map, it’s a direction you keep stumbling toward, your own suitcase in hand.

*”Guess the hardest part / Of movin’ on / Is letting go of you…”*

As the final guitar strains collapse into silence, I’m left with gratitude for the rare songs that see us, that let us be unfinished and uncertain, but still moving—maybe not quite to Tacoma, but always on the road. In “Tacoma,” Caitlyn Smith gives wandering hearts a voice, and I—still drifting, still wounded, still singing—owe her more than I can say.

**Kroes den Bock**