Carly Pearce Pulls Back the Curtain With Her Vulnerable Single ‘Dream Come True’: ‘It Felt More Like Therapy’

Reality bites.

Few adults get to experience the most fantastic life they imagined in their youth, and those who do often discover that the victory comes with hidden costs. That’s understandable. It’s lonely at the top, but the culture doesn’t focus much on that part of the deal. So it’s tough to see the dark side of success until it’s attained.

It’s what makes Carly Pearce’s “Dream Come True” special. It strips the glitter off of stardom and puts a spotlight on the sacrifices required to attain it. And while it’s written from Pearce’s career perspective, it’s not like touring as a country singer is the only glamour profession.

“It’s kind of a universal thought,” she says, “for anybody who’s ever chased any kind of dream.”

Songwriter Lauren Hungate (“Holy Smokes”) first presented the “Dream Come True” idea to Pearce during a February 2023 writing appointment that yielded the 2024 release “my place.” The goal was to look behind the on-stage spectacle for a glimpse at what entertainers give up for their vocation. It was not a typical songwriter-room pitch, since the topic didn’t hold much commercial promise.

“I knew it was probably a sad song about this job, so it would probably never be a single,” Hungate remembers. “It would be like a last track on someone’s record.”

While they didn’t write it that day, the idea resonated with Pearce, who showed some interest in tackling it down the line. More than a year later – on Aug. 20, 2024 – they had an appointment with songwriters Emily Weisband (“Can’t Break Up Now,” “Looking For You”) and Tofer Brown (“Night Shift,” “Wine, Beer, Whiskey”) at Brown’s Nashville office.

Pearce announced that she needed to write something with potential as a single, but the conversation took an unexpected turn.

“I ended up crying in the room and just saying, like, ‘I’m really having a hard time,’” Pearce recalls. “We just decided to all kind of share about the price of dreams. It felt more like therapy.”

Hungate’s “Dream Come True” title bubbled up again in that context, and everyone in the room was up for tackling it. The work went quickly.

“It was very effortless,” Brown says. “It was almost like the song was there. We just had to figure out how to bottle it up.”

Brown fashioned a gentle acoustic foundation, and Weisband created a halting melody for the opening lines of the chorus: “Nobody loves you for you/ Nobody calls you if you lose your shine.” The chorus needed just four lines to summarize the challenges of stardom. They would elaborate on specific struggles in the verses, and it wasn’t hard to find them.

“I think I had already kind of subconsciously started writing this type of song,” Pearce says, “and so I knew what parts were really important to me.”

In the opening stanza, they included her four-bedroom home with unused rooms, and the out-of-town concert booking that deprived her of attending her best friend’s wedding. Verse two referenced the gold records and celebratory plaques that all remind her of the heartaches that inspired her songs. And the final verse documented her mother’s illness (she suffers from COPD) and the inner turmoil Pearce feels at not being present when she could be useful. Every line is an accurate description of her world.

“Carly’s very strong, and she’s a hard nut to crack,” Hungate says. “To get Carly to be vulnerable, she has to feel really safe. And honestly, if you listen to the song, you can kind of see us progressively getting her more and more vulnerable with each verse.”

They were also careful, though, to include a short acknowledgement in a pre-chorus of the privilege it is to have a job so many people envy. “It’s a tricky thing to talk about,” Pearce notes, “because I never wanted people to feel like I’m not grateful.”

When she addressed her mom’s condition in the last verse, the conflict was so stark that they declined to visit the chorus a third time. Instead, “Dream Come True” quietly reiterates the title once more before ending in silence. “We easily could have gone into a big old dramatic chorus, but I think that last phrase and that last verse kind of shows that that’s where she still is,” Brown offers. “It’s not like, ‘and then all my dreams came true.’ Life doesn’t have a pretty bow all the time.”

Brown produced a spare demo with a piano solo after the second chorus. Pearce kept writing more material for her next album, but as the songs piled up, “Dream Come True” remained a priority. She recorded it on April 15 at Gold Pacific Studio – formerly Addiction – in Nashville’s Berry Hill section. The band treated it with enormous sensitivity, locking in on the approach in their third take and playing the song in its entirety each they attempted it, finally nailing it on the seventh pass.

“They were emotionally connected to it,” says producer Ben West (Ella Langley, Stephen Wilson Jr.). “Nobody was on their phone on that one.”

Drummer Aaron Sterling used brushes and a muted mallet to make the rhythm firm but understated, pianist Dave Cohen dropped a rich low note on occasion to effect quiet drama, and acoustic guitarist Bryan Sutton played with a fair amount of finger noise, which engineer Dave Clauss left exposed. “We’re always trying to lean into those little imperfections,” West says, “because those are the features rather than the liabilities in the recording.”

Fiddler Jenee Fleenor was so overcome by the final verse about Pearce’s ailing mom that she had to leave the room. But when she returned, her role was significant. West had her play the solo, redoing the piano melody from the demo on fiddle. West doubled the length of that section, and Fleenor overdubbed harmony parts to create a string quartet effect.

“The strings are the fastest track to your emotional strings,” Clauss suggests, “and it definitely works on this one.”

When Pearce tackled the final vocal at Clauss’ studio, Santa’s Workshop, she sang “Dream Come True” last, knowing she would be emotionally spent when she finished. Her touring schedule made her tonal texture even more appropriate for the song’s difficult message. “She’s going through, like, vocal drama,” Clauss says. “She was gigging so much, and it added so much to it, because it just translated the pain, the way her vocal was breaking up.”

It connected so well that when Big Machine started playing new music for radio programmers, several chains asked specifically for “Dream Come True” as a single. The label released it to country radio via PlayMPE on Nov. 12. As much as the song crystallized the challenges in her chosen career, it also reminded Pearce that the sacrifices had a purpose. “Dream Come True” helped her reconnect with that intent.

“The truth always wins,” she says, “and this is an example.”