I’m picturing what the Craig Wayne Boyd show will be like next week in Chicago. It will probably be packed, elbow to elbow, with a capacity crowd pushing and shoving to get close to the man who won The Voice.

In other words, nothing like some of his recent shows in Nashville.

Boyd, in fact, recalls one show when he played for a very, very sparse crowd. That was the night he came close to giving up.

“I remember a little more than a year ago, sitting in a pickup outside of a club after I had played to basically no one,” Boyd admitted in a recent interview.

He was talking to his drummer and told him he was ready to move on.

“Listen, I may have to quit because it’s not paying my bills,” Boyd remembers telling him. “I’m losing my house. I lost my pickup.”

He added, “I didn’t know what I was gonna do.”

It sounds like his wise drummer saw something in Boyd that now the whole world sees. He told Boyd, “Dude, you can’t do that.”

Then The Voice happened. He auditioned with Travis Tritt and Marty Stuart’s “The Whiskey Ain’t Workin’” and ultimately won. And now he’s obviously glad he didn’t quit that night in the pickup truck.

“It truly feels like validation that all the hard work that I’ve put in up to this point has been worth it," he said.