**“The Weight of These Wings” by Caitlyn Smith: A Soulful Masterpiece Hidden in Plain Sight**
*By Kroes den Bock*
There’s a scar running through some old part of myself I try not to visit anymore. When grief sharpens its teeth or loneliness returns with a vengeance, I’ll occasionally stumble across a song that’s less a soundtrack than an open hand, or a crumpled note from a stranger who seems to know me too well. That’s how I found Caitlyn Smith’s “The Weight of These Wings”—tucked away behind the glitz of stadium anthems and radio-played heartbreaks that ruled country music’s mainstream in 2016.
Smith’s haunting tune occupies the liminal space between the wreckage of goodbye and the trembling hope of a new beginning. She’s no ingenue to songwriting—her fingerprints are on many hits for other artists—but “The Weight of These Wings” isn’t constructed for chart conquest. It’s a picture painted in moonlight and morning regret, an intimate revelation meant to be stumbled over in the quiet after everyone else has gone home.
*”I packed my troubles, packed my bags
Chased the runaway sun, never looking back
Lawless on the wind, wild-eyed and worn
But every mile I put behind
Just left a heavier load to haul”*
There’s a particular ache in “Lawless on the wind, wild-eyed and worn.” It’s the weariness you earn by outrunning your demons until you realize they got faster with every escape. As someone who’s spent years running—from relationships, cities, versions of myself—I hear in Smith’s phrasing the shiver of that freedom that isn’t free. When I was younger, I imagined reinvention lay over the next rise; older now, I feel the burden of each mile.
Caitlyn Smith’s voice is the kind of clear, wounded thing that suggests she’s licking her own wounds while singing. Her delivery is neither ornamental nor overwrought. She lives where tension brews: stoic but trembling, a woman whose bones are tired but whose spirit will not yield. Tears sting the edge of her confession, but there’s also steel in her spine.
The chorus unfolds with melancholy grandeur:
*”Oh, the weight of these wings
They’re heavier than they seem
Dreams built to fly
But they tether me tight
To the troubles I thought I’d outrun
Oh, the price of the sky
It’s too high to leave it behind
The higher I go, the harder I land
With the weight of these wings in my hands”*
The paradox at the heart of the song—the wings we crave for escape are the very things that weigh us down—mirrors my own spiral. At various points in my life, I believed freedom was just another word for detachment: drop the job, the lover, the old friends, the town. Yet, the more I tried to grow wings, the more cumbersome my baggage became. Smith’s insight that the wings themselves, meant to carry you, are themselves a burden—is both an indictment and a salve.
I recall a December night three years ago. I’d ended something important with someone whose patience had outlasted my capacity for honesty. I threw what little I owned in a car and drove until daybreak, feeling weightless and victorious for maybe an hour. At a truck stop in Nebraska, staring into fluorescent-lit coffee, I realized I’d just traded one load for another. I didn’t know how to put that revelation into words then, but Smith’s “With the weight of these wings in my hands” feels like she’s writing me a letter dated that lost morning.
Musically, “The Weight of These Wings” hovers on delicate arrangement—a minor-key piano progression, subtle steel guitar like weeping wind, brushed drums with the heart’s slow pulse. Smith’s vocals are always at the front, illuminated like a lantern on a lonely road. The production doesn’t crowd her; instead, it gives her room to bleed.
There’s a moment toward the bridge where Smith sings:
*”I used to think breaking free
Would heal the ache inside of me
But these wings I made to soar
Are just anchors on my shore”*
There’s courage in admitting that even our best intentions—to heal, to transform, to leave pain behind—can backfire. I see in these lines a mirror for anyone who ever confused movement with progress. My own cycles of escape and return, the places I thought would save me, all turned out to be blank slates for the same old fears. I wanted wings. I got anchors.
And yet, Smith refuses to end in bitterness. There’s grace threaded through every sorrowful confession. The final refrain isn’t a capitulation; it’s a quiet oath to keep going—a recognition that the only way forward is not to drop your wings, but to bear their weight.
What makes this song so special to me—I suspect to anyone patient enough to give it an honest listen—is the refusal to turn pain into spectacle. There’s no needy oversinging, no melodramatic string section. Instead, Smith puts her scarred heart right in your hands and simply asks you not to look away.
*”So if you see me flying low
Know I’m carrying more than I show
Still chasing the sky, still dreaming in vain
With the weight of these wings and the memory of your name”*
The specificity is both an invitation to empathy and a challenge: Will you judge me for my failures or find yourself in them? When she sings about “the memory of your name,” I feel every trace of the people I failed, the homecomings I never attempted, the pieces of myself I left scattershot across decades.
Mental health, loneliness, the itch for meaning—these aren’t themes country radio loves anymore, unless boiled into platitudes. But “The Weight of These Wings” is unsparing: its beauty is less in its hope than in its clear-eyed accounting of the burdens we all bear. Sometimes wings lift us to grace. Sometimes they are, themselves, the things we must learn to carry.
If you’ve ever run with nowhere to go, tried to become someone else in the hope of being loveable or loved, this song is for you. Not to fix you, but to sit with you, gently. Caitlyn Smith’s under-the-radar gem deserves to be more than background music for the lost and drifting. As for me, I listen to her and remember: In the end, there’s no escape from yourself. Only the art of bearing up under the weight, and the possibility that someone, somewhere, gets it.
*Kroes den Bock*