Heart Break

Album: Heart Break (2017)
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Songfacts®:

  • This mid-tempo, Hillary Scott-led song of independence finds the Lady A trio celebrating being single for the summer. It was penned by Scott with her bandmates Dave Haywood and Charles Kelley along with Jesse Frasure and Nicolle Galyon.
  • The song serves as the title track of the group's seventh studio album. The record was released following a short hiatus taken by Lady A from recording or touring. "We knew right away that we had to name this album after a track that is a play on the word 'heartbreak,'" Hillary Scott said. "It's all about those personal growths everyone goes through, and it was liberating to get back in the studio with Charles and Dave to intertwine those feelings into the recording process."
  • The idea for Heart Break was conceived before Lady A took their hiatus, when they were reminiscing about their early, carefree days. "We sat down one day, at one of our last shows, and we were all on the bus together. I said, 'We can't take this kind of time off and not really just blow everybody away,'" Kelley recounted. "We were thinking about how to get back to that spot, how we wrote and started with the first two records. It's because we didn't have any responsibilities. Dave had the idea, let's get out of Nashville."
  • This song is not just about having a broken heart. "[It's] probably one of my favorite songs I've ever written," said Kelley. "What I love about it is, it's a clever idea that Dave had about playing off that heartbreak. Sometimes, your heart needs a break, and that's what we did: We felt like our heart creatively needed a break, and we felt like the fans needed a break... We needed to freshen it up, so it's got a lot of correlation to it."
  • The song's music video was filmed in San Juan, Puerto Rico. Directed by Shane Drake, the clip follows a woman's travels through the Puerto Rico capital city. "One of the coolest things was that all of the dancers in the video were people off the street," Charles Kelley noted. "They already exuded such a vibrant energy that's part of the culture in Puerto Rico and the Caribbean as a whole."
  • The video was filmed several months before numerous hurricanes swept through the Caribbean. Lady A used the release of the clip to raise awareness and money for those affected by the storms. The trio donated $200,000 from their LadyAID fund to hurricane relief efforts.

    "We got to meet so many locals and enjoy everything that Puerto Rico has to offer," Hilary Scott said. "We are just completely heart broken to see the devastation [and] want to do everything we can to support this incredible place and these incredible people."
  • Speaking with The Boot, Hillary Scott recalled the day the Lady A trio wrote the song with Jesse Frasure and Nicolle Galyon.

    "We were in Rosemary Beach, Florida - the first kind of retreat of making the record. We went down to Florida, and then we went out to Southern California.

    Dave came in with the idea of, "What if about if we took the word 'heartbreak' and then flipped it on its head and thought of it more as giving your heart a break." The line was, 'Taking a heart break summer,' and that's kind of where it started.

    We just were off to the races and gave it the very female-empowering message. It's from a female's perspective; I think it works both sides and should, because I love the concept of the lyric of just not jumping from one relationship to the next, but finding a stronger version of yourself before you hop into a relationship with someone else.

    It brought in melody, harmony. It felt like growth for us from the standpoint of what it allowed us to do production-wise. It just was that song that we felt like we could craft the rest of the album around."

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