[Intro]
(piano, slow build)
Yeah…
[Verse 1]
Town of a thousand people, that’s where I was made
Cameron, West Virginia, dirt roads and shade
Pittsburgh two hours east, that was the big city near
Nobody needed city lights when everything was clear
Then the divorce hit and everything just changed
Packed up and moved somewhere I couldn’t explain
Outside Milwaukee, suburb streets and designer names
I walked in looking country and they never looked the same
[Hook]
Didn’t speak their language, didn’t wear their clothes
Came from hills and hollers, they came from subdivisions and roads
I was gravel, they were pavement
Everything I was before felt like it was already gone
[Verse 2]
Fourteen hundred kids inside one building alone
Back home that was the whole town and then some
I’d sit in the hallways watching everyone connect
Like there was some unwritten code I never got
Clothes that cost more than a week’s worth of work
Back home nobody cared about that kind of hurt
We fished and we hunted and we made do with what we had
Moving to the suburbs made me miss what I never knew I had
[Bridge]
(stripped back)
But I’d go back to visit
Drive into Cameron and feel the air change
Feel my shoulders drop
Feel like myself again
Then I’d have to leave
And Wisconsin would swallow me whole again
[Chorus]
I was never home there
I was always just surviving
Black sheep in a suburb
Never stopped arriving
At the same conclusion
No matter where they put me down
The only place I ever felt like me
Was back in a thousand people town
[Verse 3]
Now I watch my kids grow up in a different place
And I think about the version of me trying to find my face
In a hallway full of strangers who had everything I didn’t
And somehow I kept going even when I couldn’t
Cameron never left me, West Virginia’s in my chest
Even when they moved me and put my roots to the test
I held onto where I came from when I had nothing left to hold
Some people find their home — mine stayed back there in the cold
[Chorus]
I was never home there
I was always just surviving
Black sheep in a suburb
Never stopped arriving
At the same conclusion
No matter where they put me down
The only place I ever felt like me
Was back in a thousand people town
[Final Bridge]
And it wasn’t just the hills or the roads or the air
It was the only place on earth where nobody stared
Where I wasn’t the new kid, the weird kid, the wrong kid
I was just a kid
And that was enough
[Outro]
I still drive into Cameron sometimes just to feel it
That feeling when the hills close in and for a minute
Just a minute
You remember who you were
Before the world told you different
Before the divorce
Before the move
Before the hallways full of people
Who never saw you
I see you now
I always did
