Heartbreaker

A song about what happens when you make someone else you're total everything. Unfortunately, it can have catastrophic results - as it did in these lyrics. The writer treated the other person better than she do herself. Did everything to make the other person happy. Sounds like it should work. But it's not healthy. You must never look to someone else to complete you. You must enter into a relationship only as a whole person. Even at the end of the lyrics, the songwriter still has not reconciled why the other had to be a "heartbreaker." I hope the songwriter (and listeners who identify with these lyrics) enters their next relationship looking for balance and leave jaded emotions behind. There are lots of wonderful partners out there who are emotionally-healthy and capable of an unselfish, mature relationship. Keep the faith.

This era of songwriting produced simple, but solid pop which had an uncomplicated structure, melodic hook and profoundly- satisfying agreement between emotional evocation of the music and the lyrical subject. It's just good storytelling. Seeing as how it was written by the Bee Gees at the top of their game, it was going to be a successful tune for someone.

Personally, I can't imagine anyone but Dionne Warwick performing this, because it was right for her and couldn't be duplicated the same by anyone else. Her talent for speaking from the heart makes her a trustworthy messenger, likely drawing from her own hard experience. She also had enough chops to communicate the intensity of her feelings, which made it sound as though she was dealing with heartbreak when she sung it.

All the best art is born out of human suffering, because this is what drives human expression. It's the need to make sense out of failure and to rise above pain. To reaffirm the right to exist, even if vulnerable and imperfect. It shows character and heart. Very human emotions. Some people have such a talent for expressing themselves in an artful, yet distinctly human way and a passion for their craft that they relate their pain to the world like an open book, which takes guts.

This is normally developed as a direct result of the person's talent for being human, no matter what the cost personally. They don't have it within them to hold back, in life or in art. The talent of artists like Dionne Warwick and The Bee Gees was complete, because they laid it on the line every time, never leaving anything on the table. When they were done, it was done. These are the people we celebrate, because everyone can relate to their story and it's powerful emotional message.

As a result, we find ourselves in ever- changing world that causes new generations to criticize the things of the past, but ironically, people keep rediscovering music like this. Sometimes they call it a guilty pleasure, because it is an exception to an otherwise observed social norm that seeks to identify itself through diminishment of relics from the previous generations. In time, this is identified with as arrogant youth or myopic ignorance.

Either way, the things of the greatest value are timeless and universal, whereas the style of the era in which it's timelessness and universality are expressed can fall out of fashion. Part of maturity is recognizing and separating the temporal and fleeting from the timeless and universal. With the wisdom of age, temporality loses it's importance and simply falls away, leaving only the proof of life's lessons learned, like so many tracks in the dirt to be rediscovered by someone later who winds up on the same trail.