NASHVILLE — A piece of acoustic indie-folk music that 32-year-old marketing coordinator Anneliese Park has, on multiple occasions, described to her therapist as “the song that finally made me feel seen” was, in fact, composed in approximately forty minutes by two session musicians in a Nashville commercial scoring studio in March 2019, for use in a thirty-second television advertisement for a leading menstrual hygiene brand.
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The song, titled in its commercial use as cue: light strum, female vocal, hopeful, max 14k for under-license, and known to Park and to an estimated 4.7 million streaming listeners as Almost Home, features a softly fingerpicked acoustic guitar, a single sustained piano note that enters at the chorus, and a lyric — “and the light will find you / wherever you are / wherever you’ve been” — that Park has, by her own count, listened to approximately 3,400 times since first encountering it.
She first encountered it during a tampon commercial.
She does not know this.
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She has not, at any point in the six years she has been listening to the song, made the connection.
“It just hits me, you know?” Park said Tuesday, sitting at a coffee shop in suburban Pasadena, scrolling through her saved tracks on her phone. “Like, there are songs that are good, and there are songs that are good in a way where you feel like the person who wrote them must have known you. Must have, somehow, somewhere, gone through what you’ve gone through. Almost Home is in that second category. It just gets it.”
She was asked what, specifically, the song got.
“All of it,” she said, after a pause. “Everything I was going through. Everything I’m still going through. The breakup. My grandmother. The therapy. The whole — I don’t know how to explain it — the whole journey. It just feels like the song was written for that exact season of my life.”
The song was written, in fact, on a Wednesday in March 2019, by a 38-year-old session guitarist named Cole Vandevander and a 41-year-old session vocalist named Brittany Sosa, in a Nashville studio rented for $185 an hour, between the hours of 2:14 p.m. and 2:54 p.m., for a flat composition fee of $4,200 split between the two of them, with a buyout clause that assigned all rights to a global advertising agency representing what one internal email refers to as “the period account.”
Sosa, reached at her home in East Nashville, said she remembers the session “vaguely.”
“I remember Cole had a sandwich,” she said. “I remember the AC was loud. I remember the brief said hopeful but not too aspirational, like, she’s going to be okay, but she’s also currently bleeding. I remember writing down the word bleeding on a Post-it and then crossing it out because it felt too on-the-nose. I remember the chorus came really fast. I remember thinking, this is fine, this’ll cut, let’s go get tacos.“
She paused.
“I had no idea anyone had ever heard it again,” she said. “I genuinely thought it was a 30-second cue, and then it was over. That’s how all of these things go. You write the cue. You record the cue. You go home. You buy groceries.”
Sosa is now aware that the song has 4.7 million streams.
She found out three weeks ago.
“My niece played it for me at a barbecue,” she said. “She said, Aunt Brit, you have to hear this song, it’s, like, my whole heart. She played it on her phone. And I sat there. And I listened to it. And about thirty seconds in, I went, oh my god. That’s my voice.“
She paused.
“I didn’t tell her,” she added. “I couldn’t. She was so emotional about it. I just sat there and let her have her moment.”
The song was originally aired in a 30-second television spot that ran on prime-time broadcast networks during the summer of 2019, depicting a young woman in soft natural lighting walking through a sunlit field, then sitting on a bed laughing with a friend, then standing alone on a balcony at dusk holding a mug, all while Almost Home swelled gently in the background. The product appeared on screen for approximately 1.4 seconds, near the end, in a tasteful close-up.
The commercial tested, internal documents indicate, “extremely well.”
What the agency did not anticipate was that approximately 11,000 viewers, in the days following the commercial’s first national airing, would use the music-identification app Shazam to find out what the song was — only to learn that the song did not, technically, exist outside of the commercial.
It had no artist.
It had no Spotify presence.
It had no Genius lyrics page.
It was, in the strict legal sense, a piece of work-for-hire stock cue music with no commercial release planned.
The agency, presented with this data, did what any rational organization would do, which is to say it scrambled. Within six weeks, Almost Home had been credited to a fictional artist named Rivers Hollow — a name generated, sources confirm, by an intern given fifteen minutes and access to a thesaurus — and released on all major streaming platforms with a sepia-toned cover image of a wheat field at golden hour, depicting no actual person.
Rivers Hollow has no social media presence.
Rivers Hollow has no website.
Rivers Hollow has, in the six years since, released eleven additional songs, all of them written in similar 40-minute sessions for similar commercial briefs, all of them subsequently retrofitted with sepia-toned cover art and fictional artist branding, all of them streaming in the low-to-mid millions, all of them collectively earning the original advertising agency an estimated $2.1 million in passive streaming revenue that the original session musicians have, per their buyout agreements, seen exactly none of.
Sosa, asked how she feels about this, paused for a long time.
“I made $2,100 on that song,” she said. “That’s my half. That was six years ago. I have not seen a penny since. The song has, by my count, made the agency about $400,000 in streaming alone. I am not, technically, allowed to say I sang it. The contract is very clear on this. I am, quote, a contributing voice on a work-for-hire commercial cue and my, quote, participation does not constitute artist credit for the purposes of public attribution.“
She paused.
“I have a niece who cries when this song comes on,” she said. “I cannot tell her I sang it. I am, by contract, forbidden from telling her I sang it. I sat across from her at a barbecue. She was crying. She put her hand on my arm. She said, Aunt Brit, do you ever just feel like a song was written about your life? I said yes. I said yes, sweetheart. I do.”
A 2024 study published by an industry research group estimated that approximately 31% of the songs on Spotify’s Coffee Shop Acoustic, Indie Folk Mornings, and Singer-Songwriter Sundays mood playlists were originally composed for commercial use — for car ads, pharmaceutical ads, hygiene products, banking, insurance, retirement planning, life insurance, and, in the largest single category, what the report labeled simply feminine wellness.
The study found, further, that listeners who had emotionally bonded with these songs were, on average, “deeply unwilling” to revisit that bond once informed of the songs’ commercial origins.
Park, when this study was read aloud to her at the coffee shop, set down her phone.
She did not say anything for a moment.
“Are you telling me,” she said carefully, “that Almost Home is —”
She was told that she had, in fact, been listening to a tampon commercial cue for six years.
There was a long silence.
“Don’t tell me which one,” she said finally. “I don’t want to know which one.”
She was told that this was reasonable.
“I have to think about this,” she said. “I’m going to need to sit with this. I might need to call my therapist. I might need to not call my therapist. I might just need to delete the song and pretend none of this ever happened. I have a playlist called songs that saved me. Three of the songs on it might be — oh god. Oh god. Two of them sound exactly the same. They have the same singer.”
She was informed that they very likely did.
She closed her eyes.
“Six years,” she said quietly. “Six years of Almost Home. Six years of telling people this song saved my life. Six years of recommending it to my sister. Six years.“
She paused.
“You know what?” she said, opening her eyes. “I don’t care. I don’t care. The song made me feel something. The song made me feel seen. It doesn’t matter what it was for. The feeling was real. My feeling was real. The song doesn’t have to mean it for it to mean something to me.”
This is, sources at the original advertising agency later confirmed, exactly what the song was designed to do.
“That’s the whole brief,” said one former agency employee, speaking on condition of anonymity because she would like to keep working in advertising. “The brief is make her feel seen, in 30 seconds, for under fourteen thousand dollars. We are very good at making people feel seen. Making people feel seen is, I would argue, the single most reliable thing the advertising industry knows how to do. We do it for tampons. We do it for trucks. We do it for life insurance. We do it for retirement funds. We do it for diabetes medication. The feeling is real. The feeling is, in some sense, the only real thing in the entire transaction.”
She added: “If you’re listening to a song right now that makes you feel seen, and you don’t know who wrote it, and the artist’s bio is one paragraph long and they have no Instagram — listen, I’m not saying it’s a commercial. I’m saying check the artist’s bio.”
At press time, Anneliese Park had not deleted Almost Home from her playlist. She was, however, listening to it more carefully. She reported hearing, for the first time, what she described as “a kind of, like, hopefulness in the bridge that I think I had always interpreted as spiritual but is now starting to feel — I don’t know how to put this — brand-adjacent.”
She was asked if she would seek the song out, knowing what she now knew.
She thought for a long moment.
“Yeah,” she said finally. “Yeah. I think I still would. I think the feeling was the feeling. I think I get to keep the feeling.”
She paused.
“I just don’t think I’m going to play it at my wedding anymore.”