One of the last songs the 30-year-old country singer Cady Groves ever recorded was about being alone and not sure where to look for hope.
“Got a million scars, don’t know where to start / Can anybody hear me now?,” she sings on the wounded but resilient single “Bless My Heart.” “The crazy nights, the stupid fights and the givin’ up …. Every time I played the game and I got cheated / Every time I heard a lie and I believed it.”
Groves had a difficult upbringing, losing two older brothers to overdoses in her teens and 20s. She’d found pop-country success in the 2010s (Blake Shelton appeared in her video for “This Little Girl”), and after she lost her deal with RCA, she won an independent fanbase for her tender, forthright songwriting about loss and longing.