A grandson's tearful goodbye to the great-grandmother who taught him how to love and how to believe
"In the Stars" is one of the most quietly devastating debut songs of the early 2020s — a track that feels less like a polished pop song and more like a private eulogy that somehow ended up on the radio. From the opening piano notes, Benson Boone makes it clear that the song isn't reaching for cleverness or commercial appeal. It's reaching for honesty about one of the hardest things a person can experience: losing someone who was woven into the fabric of your daily life, and trying to figure out how to live in a world that no longer has them in it.
Boone wrote the song after the death of his great-grandmother, who passed away at the age of 96. The two had been extraordinarily close. They used to meet every Sunday on Woods Creek Road in Monroe, Washington, to go to church together — a small weekly ritual that had been part of Boone's life for as long as he could remember. When she died, the loss didn't just take her. It took the rituals built around her. It took Sundays. It took church. It took the version of Boone that had grown up knowing she would always be there, somewhere down that road, ready to fold him into a hug and slip a folded $20 bill into a birthday card.
The song captures one of the most painful aspects of grief: the way it shakes the things you thought were stable inside you. Boone has said openly that his great-grandmother's death rattled his faith in God. The God he had grown up believing in was inseparable from her — from her quiet faith, from her Sunday mornings, from the warm hands that had taken him to church before he was old enough to choose. When she was gone, the version of God who lived inside her also disappeared. He has admitted that he now sleeps in on Sundays, unable to make the walk to church the same way without her.
What makes "In the Stars" so emotionally powerful is the small, specific details Boone chose to include. He sings about digging through old birthday letters and finding a crumpled twenty-dollar bill still inside one — a tiny image, almost embarrassingly mundane, that anyone who has lost a beloved grandparent will recognise instantly. Grief lives inside details like that. It's not the big things you miss the most. It's the cards. The handwriting. The smell of a kitchen. The way someone said your name. The song trusts that the listener understands this, and it doesn't try to dress up the small things to make them sound more profound. It just lets them be what they are.
The song's central image is what gives it its title: the comforting idea that the people we lose go into the stars, where they can still see us. It's an old, almost childlike comfort, the kind we tell to children when their pets die. But Boone sings it without irony or embarrassment. He needs to believe it. He's trying to believe it. And in trying, he gives the listener permission to believe it too — at least for the duration of the song. That's the song's gift. It doesn't promise that the dead are really up there. It just promises that needing them to be is human, and beautiful, and worth saying out loud.
What it means: I don't want to do this — I don't want to accept that you're gone.
Why it matters: This is the song's opening confession, and it's painfully simple. The narrator isn't trying to be philosophical about death. He's just refusing it. The line captures the very first stage of grief — the part where your mind keeps trying to insist that none of this is real.
What it means: Because this goodbye is the kind that lasts forever — there's no seeing you again.
Why it matters: The line gives the goodbye its weight. Every other goodbye in life carries the implicit promise of until next time. This one doesn't. The narrator has had to learn the difference between the two kinds of goodbye, and the song is the sound of that learning.
What it means: Now you exist somewhere far away, like a star in the sky — too high for me to reach but still visible.
Why it matters: This is the song's central image and the line that gives it its title. The metaphor of loved ones becoming stars is one of the oldest comforts in human grief, and Boone uses it without irony. The line is simple, almost childlike, and that simplicity is what makes it land. He needs the metaphor to be true. So do we.
What it means: Buried six feet underground, while the rain falls on the earth above.
Why it matters: This is one of the song's most painful images. The phrase "six feet under" is a common English expression for being dead and buried, but Boone adds the rain — making the picture both literal and emotionally heavy. The narrator can imagine her body, the dirt, the weather above her grave. He's not letting himself look away.
What it means: I'm sorry I haven't been able to come visit you at your burial place — I haven't been strong enough yet.
Why it matters: This is the song's most quietly devastating moment. The narrator isn't asking forgiveness for something he did. He's asking forgiveness for something he couldn't do. Some grief is too heavy to walk toward. Some losses are too sharp to face up close. The line gives that experience permission to exist.
What it means: I'm going through the old letters you sent me on my birthdays, and I find a crumpled twenty-dollar bill still tucked inside one of them.
Why it matters: Boone has said this is his favourite line in the song. It's so specific, so small, so embarrassingly real that it pierces straight through any defences a listener might have. Grief lives in the cash you forgot to spend. In the handwriting you'll never see again. In the love that turned into a folded piece of paper. The line is the song's most honest moment.
Benson Boone was a relatively unknown American singer when "In the Stars" was released in April 2022. He had first come to attention in 2021 as a brief contestant on the American singing competition American Idol, where he made it to the show's top 24 before voluntarily withdrawing — saying he wanted to develop his career on his own terms rather than through television. He was right to bet on himself. Within months of leaving Idol, he had been signed to Imagine Dragons frontman Dan Reynolds' Night Street Records, and "In the Stars" became his breakthrough single.
The song's success was driven heavily by social media. TikTok users gravitated to its emotional vulnerability and its gentle piano arrangement, using it as the soundtrack for videos about loss, family, and remembering loved ones. The song became one of those quiet viral phenomena that find their audience slowly — not through radio play or marketing campaigns, but through the personal recommendations of millions of people who had also lost someone and needed a song that understood. By late 2023, it had been certified Platinum in the United States — Boone's first Platinum single — and it has since accumulated well over a billion streams on Spotify alone, making it one of the most-listened-to songs about grief released in the modern streaming era.
In the years since "In the Stars," Benson Boone has grown into one of the most successful young pop singers in the world. His 2024 song "Beautiful Things" became a global number-one hit, and his debut album Fireworks & Rollerblades established him as one of the most distinctive voices of the 2020s — a singer with a remarkable falsetto, a flair for emotional ballads, and a willingness to write about feelings that other young pop artists tend to avoid. But for many of his earliest fans, "In the Stars" remains the song that introduced them to him — the small, raw piano confession that announced a major artist had quietly arrived.
| Word / Phrase | Meaning | Example Sentence |
|---|---|---|
| in the stars | A poetic way of describing where loved ones go after they die — somewhere far above us, but still watching | "After her grandmother died, she would look up at the night sky and feel like the brightest star was hers." |
| six feet under | A common English expression for being buried in a grave (because graves are traditionally dug six feet deep) | "He always joked that he wanted to be cremated, not six feet under." |
| to dig through (something) | To search through something (often a box, drawer, or pile) carefully, looking for something specific or remembering | "She spent the afternoon digging through her mother's old letters, crying with every page." |
Benson Boone is an American singer and songwriter born in 2002 in Monroe, Washington. He briefly appeared on American Idol in 2021 before signing with Imagine Dragons frontman Dan Reynolds' Night Street Records, and his debut single "In the Stars" became a global viral hit thanks largely to TikTok. He has since become one of the most successful young pop artists of the 2020s, with his 2024 song "Beautiful Things" reaching number one in multiple countries and his debut album Fireworks & Rollerblades establishing him as one of the most distinctive new voices in pop.
"In the Stars" is one of the most quietly perfect grief songs of the early 2020s — a track that uses simple piano and an even simpler voice to express something almost everyone has felt or will feel. For English learners, it's a beautiful study in how the smallest, most personal details ("a crumpled 20 still in the box") can carry more emotional weight than any grand metaphor. Listen to the way Benson Boone holds back his voice in the verses and then lets it soar in the chorus — that movement, from quiet to broken, is the entire emotional shape of grief, and you don't need a translation to understand it.