“Thinking ’Bout You” also caught the eye of Mason, her now boyfriend, a young, Nashville-based country singer who’d been releasing music with Interscope and UMG Nashville after dropping out of Ole Miss during the pandemic. “I listened to the song a hundred times,” Mason says. He DM’d Lefty. To his delight, she replied. She was coming to Nashville the following month and wanted to hang out. When the two met, they immediately became inseparable.

Mason has been following Lefty around a lot this summer. She brought him onstage to sing their duet, “Someone to Lose,” at Lollapalooza. He also tagged along for the accursed IUD appointment the next day.

“Boston” is about Mason. Lefty wrote it right after they met in Nashville.

“This was the first week of us,” Lefty recalls. “Oh my god.”

“I wrote the chorus to ‘Boston,’ posted it, and didn’t think about it at all,” she remembers. “I woke up the next morning and [the video] had done relatively well.” Fans were into it.

They also pointed out that the record sounded a lot like Noah Kahan’s 2024 single “Stick Season,” another once-viral New England Americana anthem. “When I was writing the song, I wasn’t thinking about Noah Kahan,” Lefty says. “I was literally thinking about nothing at all.” She didn’t register the similarity at all when fans first remarked on it, but eventually Kahan’s reps got in touch. “We think this sounds similar,” Lefty remembers them saying. She and her team decided to give Kahan a writing credit before the song officially came out, preventing any risk of legal action. “I don’t want to step on anybody’s toes, so I’m like, if this sounds like that, whatever, all good.”

“Boston”’s origin story is emblematic of Lefty’s rise. Every step has had the same lurching, horse-before-the-cart speed. She has scrambled to meet demand and fill the shoes of a Top 10 popstar. Long Way Home was originally slated for a September release, but the label decided to drop it sooner, necessitating a mad dash to finish it. Lefty’s Lollapalooza set, originally scheduled for early afternoon— “the ass crack of dawn,” as she put it—was moved to 7:45 p.m. at the last second, presumably to adjust for her exponential growth in name and song recognition in the weeks leading up to the festival. (Representatives from Lollapalooza did not respond to a request for comment.)

“It’s unfathomable for all of us involved,” Enger says. “It has been an insane rise.”

“There was stuff happening with Stella in the beginning where I was like, Oh yeah, I can relate to this. That’s normal.” Mason says. “I just shrug at her now. I’m like, Good luck. I can’t relate to it. But it’s been really cool to see.”