Eileen Carey calls ‘This Is Where’ a reflective, uplifting breakup song about “two people who outgrew each other but carried the courage, love, and lessons forward.” I have one of those on my record and I think about it more fondly than I’d ever admit at a party. Two years with a man who was good to me, and I walked anyway because I wanted a life he was never going to be built for. No villain and no fucking apology from me about any of it. I text him on his birthday every year because holding a grudge against a man I chose to leave would be some weak shit. Carey builds the entire track around that specific ending, where the love was real and it still had a stopping point neither of them was going to argue with. Nobody in this song gets cast as the one who ruined it. ‘This Is Where’ treats the final page of one story as the opening page of two better ones, and it pulls that off without a single bitter note.
Somebody made a smart call in the studio and refused to let this song sound sad. The whole arrangement moves forward the entire time, so the breakup gets narrated by music that has already decided everything works out, and that gap between what she’s saying and what’s playing underneath her is where the track gets its charge. Carey has built a career on that trick and she’s better at it than her chart position suggests. Her voice sits on top with a little grit in it, close enough that she sounds like she’s telling you this at a kitchen table rather than performing it at you. She could have milked every second of this material for sympathy and flatly declines, which is the sexiest fucking thing happening here. A woman who ends something on purpose doesn’t need a string section explaining her feelings, and Carey clearly knows that about herself.
Carey works out of Altadena, California, and she’s been stacking wins at a pace that should embarrass artists with ten times her budget. Over 25 career awards, including New Music Awards AC/Hot AC Breakthrough Artist of 2025 and the Independent Music Network’s Entertainer of the Year that same year. She took New Music Awards Crossover Artist of the Year in 2022 and again in 2023, which tracks for a woman whose entire thing is refusing to pick a lane. She’s played close to 80 notable venues and shared stages with Don McLean and Jefferson Starship. She’s also the kind of performer who gets a seated room on its feet before the third song, which is a skill you cannot fake or buy. Outside the music she runs The Music Mom blog and reps Joe Blasco Cosmetics. ‘This Is Where’ came out of writing sessions with Lily Wilson and follows last year’s ‘Carry Me Away,’ and Carey has said the song came from observation rather than her own history, which is the harder fucking skill by a mile.
Every breakup song wants me to pick a side and Carey won’t hand me one. She writes two people who wanted different lives badly enough to go take them, which is the most grown shit I’ve heard on country radio all year. Mine is married now to a woman who wanted the life he wanted. I’m out here running the one I left to go get, and neither of us walked away short. ‘This Is Where’ makes room for that ending without asking anybody in it to apologize, and Carey sings it like a woman who is already three chapters into whatever comes next.
