What the World Saw
Copyright© 2026 by Marc Nobbs
Part 10: Post from the Blog “Sweet Tea, Six Strings & Saturdays” by SweetTeaMaddie (Maddie Puritt)
Companion to A Healing Love, Chapter 3
KAYLA VALENTINE JUST SANG OVER LONDON AND I HAVE NOT RECOVERED!
9:32 p.m. CST
Hey, y’all!!!
Okay, I need y’all to sit down because I am LITERALLY still shaking.
Did you watch Kayla’s livestream from London tonight? If you didn’t, stop reading this, go to her YouTube channel, watch it immediately and then come back, because I need to talk about this with people who understand.
Are you back? Good. I really need to learn how to embed YouTube videos on here. Then I wouldn’t have to send you away.
Anyway...
I got home from school after choir practice today, tossed my backpack somewhere near the couch and went straight for my laptop. I had spent the whole day checking the time difference because London is six hours ahead of us in January, and I was terrified I’d get it wrong and miss the whole thing. It might have been nearly six here in Alabama, but it was almost midnight in England.
Midnight!
Mama brought my supper to my desk because I refused to leave the stream, though she said that didn’t mean I was allowed to start eating every meal in my bedroom from now on.
I opened YouTube early and sat there watching the ‘Stream Starts Soon’ message while the chat filled up with people from everywhere. England, Scotland, Canada, Australia, Germany, and so many people from Alabama that somebody finally wrote ROLL TIDE and started a whole argument I am not getting involved in.
Then the stream started.
Y’all!!!!
THE SHARD
That is the actual name of the building. I looked it up. It is this enormous glass tower that looks like somebody planted a giant icicle in the middle of London. It’s the tallest building in Europe or something. Over a thousand feet tall. Google said there’s one in Russia that’s about a hundred feet taller than that, but I’m not sure that counts as Europe.
Anyway, the performance was happening at The View from The Shard, a public viewing deck nearly eight hundred feet above the city. Only, it was closed to the public for the celebrity party after the premiere of Chloe Goodman’s new movie, which features Kayla’s new song.
That’s why Kayla was there and why she was performing, because her new song is the movie theme tune. I’ve not seen the movie, but I want to because it sounds really good, and Kayla’s song plays over the opening titles like a James Bond film or something.
Anyway...
The cameras showed the London Eye glowing behind the stage, with the Houses of Parliament farther away, and everything below her looked like lights from a Christmas village.
And there was Kayla.
Kayla Valentine from Beaverbrook, Alabama.
Beaverbrook is even smaller than Clanton, and everybody knows Clanton is not exactly New York City. Yet there she was in a beautiful white cocktail dress, holding her sunburst Gibson Hummingbird and getting ready to sing at a glamorous movie-premiere after-party with actual Hollywood stars watching her.
A girl from a town smaller than mine was standing eight hundred feet above London, England.
I am not ashamed to admit that I got a little emotional before she even played a note.
People who aren’t from places like ours probably don’t understand why that matters so much. Kayla didn’t grow up in Nashville or Los Angeles with famous parents or important people opening doors for her. She grew up in a tiny Alabama town. She sang at local cafés and fairs and anywhere else people would let her stand up with a guitar.
Now she was performing at the top one of the most famous cities in the world. I mean that literally. It’s the highest stage in the city—eight hundred feet in the air!
If she can get from Beaverbrook to the top of The Shard, maybe small-town Alabama girls really can go anywhere.
Okay. I have to talk about the actual music now because that is supposedly what this blog is for.
“A Woman’s Work”
The first song was the theme from Chloë Goodman’s new movie, Never Send a Man, and it is called “A Woman’s Work.”
I’ve heard clips of it, and it’s like this grand, sweeping song with an orchestra and electric guitars and huge production, but this was the first time I’d heard the whole song, and I was not prepared.
Kayla performed it completely acoustic.
No band. No backing singers. No orchestra.
Just her voice and one guitar.
It was like it was a different song or something.
I sing in the school choir, and I have been learning guitar long enough to know how brave it is to stand there and sing with just your guitar. People sometimes think an acoustic performance is the easy version because fewer musicians are involved, but it can actually be much harder because there’s nowhere to hide. If your breathing slips or your pitch wobbles or your rhythm isn’t right, everybody hears it.
Everybody notices.
But Kayla didn’t hide from anything.
The lyrics are beautiful and heartbreaking, but it was the way she sang them that got me. She would pull her voice right back until it was almost fragile, then let a note grow without ever losing control of it. She didn’t need to belt every line to prove she could sing. She trusted the song enough to let the quiet parts stay quiet.
That takes real control.
And even though it came from a big action movie made in London, the acoustic version sounded like our Kayla. It sounded as though she had taken this enormous movie song, carried it all the way home to Alabama and sat down to sing it on somebody’s front porch.
I need that version released.
Immediately.
The second song that SOMEONE needs to identify for me
The second song was also from the movie, but unless I missed it, nobody said what it was called.
It was completely different from “A Woman’s Work”—bright, upbeat and ridiculously catchy. Kayla was swaying with her guitar and smiling that huge smile of hers, and I was swaying in my desk chair before we even reached the second chorus.
The melody keeps climbing through the chorus and doesn’t really settle until the final line. Our choir director calls that “melodic lift,” because it makes you feel as if the music is lifting you along with it. Whatever it is called, it WORKED.
I have been humming a song for the last three hours without knowing its name or most of its words.
This is a problem.
If anybody knows the title, please tell me before I lose my mind.
But then...
BUT THEN
Kayla thanked everybody and said she had only planned to perform the two songs from the movie.
Then she said she had asked if she could do one more.
I was already sitting up straighter because something about the way she said it felt different. The first two songs were part of the event. Both of them are in the movie. But the way she introduced it made this one feel personal before she even told us what it was.
She said she had written it a couple of years ago after somebody broke her heart and that, in a way, it was the reason she was standing there that night.
And then she started playing...
“You Made Me (A Woman)”
I SCREAMED.
Mama shouted from the hallway to ask if I was all right, and I shouted back that Kayla was singing “You Made Me,” which apparently did not answer her question.
I know every word of this song. I know the chords, although I’m not good enough on the guitar yet to play them. It is one of my favourite Kayla songs and one of the greatest heartbreak songs ever written!
And I will argue with anybody about that.
But I have never heard her sing it like she did tonight.
At one point in the song, the rhythm changes and the whole performance becomes more intense. The actual key doesn’t change, but it feels as though something inside the song has shifted and Kayla gets just a little louder.
But tonight, Kayla leaned a little closer to the microphone and pushed more emotion into her voice without really getting louder.
That is SO much harder than just belting.
People always notice singers who can hit enormous notes, but sometimes holding back makes a song hurt more. Kayla sounded as though she was trying to keep herself together while every word pulled her apart.
Then, right at the end, she let all that intensity disappear.
One soft line.
A pause.
A tiny flourish on the guitar.
“I still love you ... even though you’re gone.”
I had actual goosebumps all over both arms.
Not pretend internet goosebumps.
Real ones.
I checked.
And now we need to discuss the other thing because I have watched the recording back four times and I am CERTAIN I did not imagine it.
WHO WAS AT THE BACK OF THE ROOM?
Kayla was not singing that song to the people in front of the stage.
The actors and all the important movie people were standing down there. The cameras showed them several times. Chloë Goodman was right at the front with John Latham and Sam Bradwell.
But Kayla kept looking beyond them.
Toward the back.
At first, I thought she was just looking around the room. Kayla always makes eye contact with different parts of an audience. That is one of the things that makes her so good live.
But this was different.
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