Sometimes, Song of the Week earns its place not by being good, but by being irritatingly catchy. Alicia Keys’ Try Sleeping With A Broken Heart promises greatness akin to Leona Lewis’s Bleeding Love, but ultimately fails to deliver.
The first 48 seconds are flawless. A growling synth rubs up against a booming, crashing, wonderfully artificial drum beat and “sexy” murmurings from Alicia ("let’s do it baby, let’s do it do it"). As the verse kicks in, her plaintive coos and sighs are offset with a soothing church organ recalling Prince at his most feverish and devastating. The intense militant drums build an immediate sense of gloomy sexual frustration, and the leading hook “Have you ever tried sleeping with a broken heart?/Well you could try sleeping in my bed” is arresting and addictive.
Then, as Alicia’s heavy breathing of the desperate “touch me, feel me” (00:45) progresses into the chorus with its punchy synth chords, Try Sleeping With A Broken Heart turns into a TV advert. The supposedly uplifting chorus becomes a vacuous sing-song, accompanied by what sounds like a baby mobile doing an impression of a computer game. Any semblance of real emotion is obliterated as the song starts to sound like a radio jingle. And thus the track continues in a tug-of-war between a glittering verse and an inexcusable chorus.
Likewise, Alicia Keys delivers a wildly inconsistent vocal. Her glossy, unemotional soul-without-the-soul voice gives way to some affecting phrasing and delicious warbling. The tough, bitter “nobody ever shut it down like you” (01:24) is richly love-struck; “I thought you told me, you’d never leave me” (01:34) sounds as stale and unconsidered as the clichéd lyric. While there is something gloriously pseudo-religious about “You know that I’ll always be in love with you” (01:46), she promptly undermines it with the drippy, whoa-Bodyform“right to the end” (01:51).
Similarly, the middle eight swerves from dramatic and elegiac with “Anybody coulda told you right from the start it’s ‘bout to fall apart” (02:20) to the trite “So rather than hold onto a broken dream, I’ll just hold onto love” (02:26). The way this track careers from quality to crud in a matter of seconds is really quite special.
And then, why oh why did you have to drag your piano into this, Alicia? The instrumental interlude sounds like Richard Clayderman playing greatest movie hits, and then to make matters worse, Alicia decorates it with a twiddly collection of insipid la’s which belong on the background music for daytime chat shows. Just to bang in the last nail, the song ends with the kind of graceless “boom-tch-tch-boom-tch-tch-boom” more commonly heard masquerading as a coda on a Casio keyboard.
Try Sleeping with a Broken Heart should be a moving, soulful, epic pop record, and there is still much to praise in the stripped-bare drum track and gasping melody. Sadly an often mannered performance and some odd production choices make this song one of pop’s missed opportunities. Some tracks warrant and reward repeat listening. This is not one of them.
Alicia Keys’ Try Sleeping With A Broken Heart and her fourth studio album, The Element of Freedom, are both out now.
By Stephanie King