Waco in My Rearview: The Story Behind the Song I Wrote for Daron

Y’all. I need to tell you this story because it is one of my favorites. And it starts in Nashville.

Last summer Daron and I went to a writers’ round. If you have never been to one, here is what it is: songwriters sit on a stage and they sing the songs they wrote, and in between they tell you the story behind them. That is it. That is the whole thing.
I was completely captivated.

Because I realized something sitting in that room that I had somehow never put together before. Songwriting is storytelling. Especially in country music, it is straight up storytelling with a melody. And I looked over at Daron and I said, you have so many good stories worth telling. We have to do something with them.

I went home and pulled out every journal I had.

The Dream I Almost Forgot

This is where it gets spiritual for me, and I am just going to say that straight out. I have kept journals for years. It is how I process, how I think, how I hear. And I also have these dreams at night that have become kind of a love language between me and Jesus. I wake up and I just know what they mean. It has been that way for a long time.

A few years back I had one of those dreams. I was sitting in a car looking into a rearview mirror, and behind me my car was pulling something heavy. Baggage. And in the dream I knew it needed to be released. I wrote it down and then I mostly forgot about it.  Until the morning it came back to me out of nowhere.

I went and found that journal entry. Read it. Sat with it. And a few days later I was driving and I looked in my rearview mirror and it just hit me all at once.

“Waco in my rearview.”

That is Daron’s story. Letting go of the past, moving toward the future. We had even been talking about that exact thing in counseling, the work of releasing what is behind you so you can fully step into what is ahead. And suddenly a dream from years ago, a moment in a car, and a decade of his story all clicked into the same frame.

I called him that day. I said, Daron. “Waco in my rearview.” That is the song. That is it. That’s the story of how I wrote a song for my husband.

The Man the Song Is About

Daron Farmer is my husband and one of my favorite humans on this planet. He has an incredible voice, the kind that stops a room, and he has been a musician and worship leader and pastor for most of his life.

We have been together for almost ten years now and our love story is one of those ones that sounds like something you would read in a book. Because honestly it kind of is.

I had been single for six years before we met. Six years of building my business, raising my son, figuring out who I was outside of everything I thought I was supposed to be.

And Daron had walked through his own impossible seasons. He lost his first wife to cancer after seventeen years of marriage. He had two kids, a church, a community, a whole life rooted in Waco, Texas, and then she was gone. He tried love again after that and it ended in heartbreak.

So when we found each other, we were both carrying things. Both a little bruised. Both a little unsure.  We started as friends first. FaceTime calls before FaceTime was cool, him in Waco and me in Northern Kentucky, just two people talking for hours. And somewhere in those conversations we realized we were supposed to be more than that.

He Left Everything He Had Ever Known

This is the part that gets me every time.  My son’s dad lives here in the Cincinnati area. Which means I needed to stay. And Daron, without hesitation, made the call that he was going to come to me.

He packed up Waco. His business, his family, his church, his ministry, his community. The only city he had ever known. He stepped away from his role as a pastor. He loaded up his kids. And he moved to a place where he knew exactly two people and one of them was going to be his wife.
That kind of faith is not small. That kind of love is not casual.

He did not just fall in love with me. He surrendered something significant to build a life with me. And I think about that all the time.

How the Song Came Together

After that moment in the car I went back through our voice notes and my journals. I started pulling together the pieces of his story the way I would outline a chapter of a book. The small town of Waco he grew up in. Losing his first wife. Trying love a second time and getting hurt again. Standing at the edge of something new and being terrified to step into it.  And then stepping in anyway.

The bridge is the part I am most proud of because it captures the thing that is hardest to put into words. That moment when your heart has already been broken and you are scared and you do not want to try again. And you do it anyway. Because God. Because love. Because somehow even in the bravest and most vulnerable version of yourself you take the leap.

He took it. And it found him. That is our love story.  Here is the chorus because I want you to have it.

Waco in my rearview, mile by mile, letting go

Every heartbreak, every hallelujah, built a man but broke my soul

I ain’t running, I’m just moving towards a life I’ve never known

With my faith and my kids, Waco in my rearview

The Scripture Behind It

There is a verse that I kept coming back to as I wrote this.

Revelation 12:11 says they overcame by the blood of the Lamb and by the word of their testimony.

Your testimony is not just something you share in church on Sunday. It is a weapon. It is a declaration of what God has done in your life that the enemy cannot argue with because he was there. He watched it happen. And you are still standing.

Daron’s story is one of the most powerful testimonies I know. Grief and heartbreak and starting over and faith and love and a whole new life built from the ruins of the one he thought was gone. That is the word of his testimony. And I wanted to put it in a song so he could sing it.  So he could hear his own story back and remember who he is.

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Waco in My Rearview is the first single from Daron’s new project, a country album that tells the stories of his life with deep faith woven all the way through. This is the first time he has released music like this, country music rooted in his own story, and y’all. It is so good.

It is out now. Available everywhere you stream and download music.  Go listen right now. And then share it everywhere you can. Because the word of his testimony deserves to travel.

Overcomers do not stay quiet. They sing.

XO,