be her

The song everyone names when they're asked which Dandelion track will still matter in ten years. Co-written with Lori McKenna and Hailey Whitters — two writers who could have made this song heavy and didactic — it instead lands light and specific. It's a song about figuring out who you're allowed to be when nobody's watching.

McKenna's hand is unmistakable in the lyric — small images, ordinary places, a refusal to reach for the dramatic statement. The production is restrained to match: a fingerpicked acoustic, a single piano in the second verse, a violin (Mickey Galyean's only credit on the record) that holds long notes under the chorus. There's no drum kit until the bridge, and even then it's a single floor tom.

It was never released as a single but is the track Ella has talked about most in interviews. It's also the song she's most often asked to sing at industry events — the kind of song that gets covered at songwriter rounds and turns up at the CMA Awards' in-memoriam segments. A working musician's song. Quiet, unshowy, and impossible to forget once you've spent time with it.