Day 8: Break Your Heart (Song-a-day January)

 

Day 8: Break Your Heart
By David Coile

Part of my daily songwriting project for January 2025

Lyrics:

These broken verses
These awkward rhymes
They are in service
Of my designs

They'll win you over
And given time
They'll break your heart

Our common language
Familiar terms
Will have new meaning
Will be relearned

Some may escape you
But they'll return
To break your heart

Some words are best written down
Some words are best when said out loud
Some will amuse you
Some will accuse you
Some will confuse you
Yeah

I wrote some lyrics
Put them to song
I think you'll like them
I could be wrong

And if you're weakened
If you're not strong
If you're not ready
To sing along
They'll break your heart

***

Details:

This was written for Day 4 of Timmy Riordan's January Fearless Songwriter program, in which he challenges participants to write a song everyday for a week. He provides a writing prompt each day, and today's prompt was "The Song of a Poet".

I wasn't thrilled with the poetry angle, so I immediately tried to see if there was a way to work around it. My first thought was to lampoon it; I came up with the line "I'm gonna rhyme like a mime working overtime," and it was gonna be a bunch of bad rhymes by a wannabe poet looking to get laid. But I wasn't in the mood to write another comedy song.

So then I thought about doing a song about an accomplished poet who couldn't find the words to express his love for someone, so he writes a melody to be whistled. It still felt too much like a joke.

I ended up playing around on the guitar until I came up with this chord progression and rhythm, then wrote something to fit the mood. I did manage to avoid writing actual poetry by making the song about someone who's writing poetry (and putting it to song).

I like the vibe and the groove of the song. It's harder to write lyrics for long, drawn out syllables, I think, because there are fewer words and they have to be just right (I'm not sure I got them just right). Also, this song is surprisingly hard to sing. I'm not a trained singer, so I'm not sure why. It doesn't seem to have a broad range, but maybe there's something about the intervals. I tried singing it in several keys, but higher or lower didn't help. If any of you trained vocalists can explain to me why this might be hard to sing, please let me know...