“When I was 14, my youngest brother Steve drove me to see George Strait in Houston at [legendary honky-tonk] Gilley’s. I snuck in and was one of the first ones in the stands, waiting for George to come out, and this young girl opened the show. I sat there and told my brother, ‘I’m going to open for him some day. You wait and see.’ So fast-forward a few years — I got the call to open for George Strait, and my brother was the very first person that I called to tell him my news.
“Fast-forward a little bit down the road; I was at our daughter’s school one afternoon, screaming my lungs out for this tug-of-war competition. At the end of the afternoon, I drove fast to the studio because I was — finally, after all these years — getting to sing with George Strait. [The two duetted on “A Showman’s Life” for Strait’s 2011 album Here for a Good Time.]
“As I’m driving to the studio, it hit me so hard that, 30 years prior, I was that young 14-year-old girl, my daughter’s age, in the stands wanting so badly just be on the same stage as George Strait, and here I was driving to the studio to sing on George Strait’s album. It was a powerful moment. I love you, George. Nobody on planet Earth can possibly touch you.”