Nathan Bryce and Loaded Dice have released “Gone Since Texas,” a song built from something real. A Texas show. Someone standing in the crowd wearing a dragonfly pin. A drive back to Missouri after the lights went down and what felt like a normal goodbye turned into something harder to name.

The song started as an email according to the press release. Moreover, Nathan Bryce sent some lyric ideas to songwriter Candace Crockett about that night, the kind of moment that sticks with you for reasons you can’t quite explain. Crockett sat with it and wrote the bones of the song in one stretch on a flight to Vancouver Island. She sent it back and neither of them wanted to change much. It already said what needed saying.

“What stayed with me was the realization that she wasn’t gone when she went back to Missouri,” Crockett says. “She was already gone in Texas before he even knew it.”

The song lives in that uncomfortable space where one person is still holding on and the other has already let go. There’s no big confrontation, no moment where everything gets clear. Just the slow, quiet recognition that something was already slipping away before either of them could stop it.

“Gone Since Texas” is available now.