In the winter of 2004, Michael Bublé was living the dream that most twenty-something singers would sell their souls for: sold-out theatres across Europe, screaming crowds in Asia, magazine covers piling up back home in Canada, and a voice that made grown women weak at the knees. Yet every night he stepped off stage drenched in applause, but the moment the lights went down and the tour bus pulled away, a quiet, crushing loneliness settled over him like a heavy coat he couldn’t take off.

His fiancée, the actress and singer Debbie Timuss, was on the other side of the continent, building her own career in Los Angeles. Months stretched between visits. Phone calls were rushed and tearful. Letters arrived smelling faintly of her perfume, and every word felt like both oxygen and torture. One particularly brutal night in New York, after performing to 15,000 people who adored him, Michael locked himself in a hotel room overlooking Times Square, picked up his guitar, and let the homesickness pour out of him in one unbroken stream.

“Another summer day has come and gone away In Paris and Rome… but I wanna go home May be surrounded by a million people I Still feel all alone… I just wanna go home…”

He recorded the demo on his laptop at 3 a.m., voice cracking on every chorus, tears dropping onto the guitar strings. It was never intended for public ears. It was a private confession, a love letter in 6/8 time, a way to shrink the distance between two hearts that felt impossibly far apart. When legendary producer David Foster heard the rough recording the next week, he refused to let it stay hidden. “This isn’t just a song,” Foster told him. “This is a prayer.” Against Michael’s protests that it was too naked, too fragile, “Home” was placed as the closing track on the album It’s Time, released in February 2005.

The world fell gently in love. Radio embraced it immediately. Couples chose it for their first dance. Airports played it in departure lounges. Michael thought the story would end there: a sweet, slightly melancholy hit about missing the woman he planned to marry.

Then the war found the song.

By spring 2005, the United States and its allies were deep into both Iraq and Afghanistan. Hundreds of thousands of young men and women were serving multiple tours, living in 130-degree shipping containers, counting days on walls, and clinging to anything that felt like connection to the dusty, dangerous reality around them. And somehow, in military bases from Baghdad to Bagram, in Humvees rolling through the desert, in care packages stuffed with baby wipes and beef jerky, Michael Bublé’s tender ballad began to appear.

Soldiers burned it onto CDs labeled “Music to Come Home To.” Wives uploaded homemade music videos on the fledgling YouTube, slow-motion footage of flag-draped tarmac reunions set to Michael’s aching chorus. Military DJs on Armed Forces Radio played it so often that it became unofficial sign-off music. A lieutenant in the 101st Airborne wrote the chorus lyrics in Sharpie on the inside of his Kevlar helmet so that every time he lowered it over his eyes, he was reminded why he was still breathing.

And then the letters began arriving at Michael’s management office, thick manila envelopes postmarked APO, covered in desert sand that spilled out when you opened them.

A 22-year-old private from Ohio wrote that he played “Home” on his iPod during a firefight outside Mosul; the melody kept him calm enough to drag his wounded buddy to safety. A Navy corpsman stationed on the USS Abraham Lincoln confessed that the medical team sang it together after particularly brutal casualty days, voices shaking, hands trembling, still covered in blood. A mother from San Diego sent a photo of her Marine son’s grave at Fort Rosecrans National Cemetery; carved beneath his name were the words “I just wanna go home.”

Michael read them all. Every single one. His assistant remembers walking into his Vancouver home one afternoon and finding him on the living room floor surrounded by thousands of letters, face streaked with tears, unable to speak.

“I thought I understood loneliness when I wrote that song,” he later told Oprah in a 2007 interview, voice breaking even two years later. “But these kids… they were living a kind of alone in a way I will never comprehend. And they took my silly little love song and turned it into their lifeline. I felt so small, and so honored, all at once.”

From that moment on, “Home” belonged to them.

When Michael performed it live, he stopped introducing it as a song about Debbie. Instead, he began walking to the edge of the stage, looking directly into the audience, and saying softly: “This next song was written for one woman I missed very much. But you… all of you… gave it back to me for a million others who are still waiting to come home.”

He invited soldiers on leave to join him on stage. He flew to Walter Reed Army Medical Center and sang it bedside to amputees who couldn’t yet go home themselves. When Blake Shelton and he recorded a duet version in 2008, every penny of Michael’s proceeds went to military family charities. The music video for that duet intercut their studio performance with real footage of troops boarding planes, running into the arms of children, kissing spouses on tarmacs while “Home” swelled underneath. It remains one of the most-watched country crossover videos of all time.

Years later, long after the major combat operations ended, the song still refuses to fade from military culture. At every single homecoming ceremony filmed at Fort Hood, Fort Campbell, Camp Lejeune, someone in the crowd is holding a handmade sign that says “Let Me Go Home” in Michael Bublé’s handwriting font. Reunion videos on TikTok still rack up tens of millions of views when they use his track. In 2022, a viral video showed a soldier surprising his daughter at her elementary school holiday concert; the moment she saw him in uniform and sprinted into his arms, the school orchestra struck up – unprompted – the opening chords of “Home.” Half the parents were sobbing before the first verse even began.

Michael and Debbie Timuss eventually parted ways in 2008, an amicable split that left the original inspiration for the song in the past. But he has never stopped calling “Home” the greatest gift of his life, because it grew far beyond the two of them.

In a 2023 documentary, Michael stood on the same Vancouver beach where he once scattered some of those military letters into the ocean as a private thank-you ritual, and said: “I spent one lonely night missing my fiancée and wrote three minutes of music. Seventeen years later, that same three minutes has welcomed hundreds of thousands of heroes back to their real homes, dried millions of tears, and reminded an entire generation what we were fighting for. I will never write anything more important. And I didn’t even really write it alone anymore, the soldiers finished it for me.”

Tonight, somewhere in the world, another plane is touching down on American soil. Another spouse is waiting at the gate with shaking hands. Another child is clutching a yellow ribbon. And as the wheels kiss the runway, chances are Michael Bublé’s voice, soft and trembling just like it was that rainy night in 2004, is floating through the air, carrying one more soul safely across the final miles.

“Let me go home It’s been so long I’m coming home…”

And because of one heartbroken crooner who simply missed his girl, they finally are.