The Song: “Give My Heart a Break”
a 2024 single by Cazzi Opeia
reached #7 on the Sverigetopplistan
I decided on the song for this year’s 2 April piece rather late. Much of my thoughts about music in 2024 have so far been dominated by two songs: the Sundays’ “Here’s Where the Story Ends”, a lilting threnody about the end of a relationship, and ABC’s “The Look of Love”, currently my favourite song of all time. (SUCH a perfect tune. They should teach it in “Philosophy of Love” courses.) Since January I’ve been oscillating between these two, trying to coalesce my love for them into words and put them onto paper — but it’s been hard. No sooner had I decided on one than the other would start AGGRESSIVELY asserting its own merits in my head, asking to see the light of day; I eventually decided on “The Look of Love”, only to realise 800 words in that I was basically writing a self-pitying, self-loathing diatribe.
In part to take my mind off things, I returned to Eurovision. Those of you who’ve somehow skipped twenty-two months of my Eurovision winner reviews will still probably have guessed that I am quite big on the Contest; I’ve been following it on and off since 2010, and in the past couple of years I’ve been quite interested in the build-up to the Contest as well. I don’t really follow the national finals (too much effort and I’ve got a whole life to lead) but I did read a couple of reviews about them this year, and so it was that I came across Cazzi Opeia’s “Give My Heart a Break” in the Swedish national final, the Melodifestivalen. What a cute title, I thought. I wonder what it sounds like?
I went online for a listen, and was absolutely shocked. What greeted my ears was one of the most basic songs I had ever heard in my entire life, repetitive, badly-sung and lyrically nonsensical. It was the type of uninspired, hyper-polished pop that, in recent years, Sweden has been constantly lambasted for sending — and emphatically not the kind of song that the country should have sent to the ESC.
And I was shocked, because I genuinely, unabashedly love it.
Let me clarify: this is not a guilty pleasure for me. I’ve never been a fan of that concept — either you like something or you don’t, no need to complicate things — so I don’t like it in the way others claim to like bad talent show performances, or “Shake It Off”, or Plan 9 from Outer Space. I honestly think that “Give My Heart a Break” is a masterful piece of pop music, one that deserves never-ending praise and more. I genuinely believe this song deserves to be heard by every single person in the world, made into a billion TikToks, talked about in the same breath as “Houdini” or “Vampire” or whatever it is that the kids listen to nowadays.
But all the same: I stand by what I wrote in that introduction. All those things I talked about up there: the repetitive lyrics, the slapdash performance, those are all actual criticisms I have with the song and its performance at this year’s Melodifestivalen. So that got me thinking: why is it that I like this song? What kind of hold does it have on me? I wanted to dig into it further. (And yes, this is really my roundabout way of saying that ABC and the Sundays will have to wait for their turn. I’ve still got the files on my computer! I’ll get to them someday…)
I suppose one could start with the obvious: that monster hook. Cazzi Opeia is no amateur when it comes to songwriting — besides having a hand in last year’s ESC winner (which I’ll get to writing about in maybe 2031), she also writes a lot of K-pop. And I do mean a lot: pull up an album by Red Velvet or Twice or ITZY, and there’s a high chance that you’ll spot her name hidden amongst the credits. Perhaps that’s why “Give My Heart a Break” sounds so immediate, so powerful: that hook hits right as the song starts, flighty and romantic, and she keeps returning to that hook as the song goes on. And the weird thing is, you never tire of it: it’s got just enough ups and downs in it to sound fresh, yet it’s so simple that you’ll have remembered it without even meaning to. After a couple of listens I was already humming it along with her, and I continued to do that long after I had closed YouTube, stood up from my seat and went out to lunch. She knows what she’s doing, and she hones in on it hard.
But the hook doesn’t grab me just because it’s infectious — lots of songs have infectious hooks. Instead, its true power lies in how it seems to pack all the emotions of a relationship into one single melody. In six or seven brief seconds, we cycle through joy, doubt, depression, hope; a whole rollercoaster that’s over in the blink of an eye, that leaves you disoriented. But though you don’t know what’s just happened, you do know that you need it to happen again; those seven seconds are a taste of heaven, a vision of spring. You can literally see the flowers blossoming in front of your eyes, and it’s so dreamy that you’re left wanting more of it. A couple of years ago I gushed about “Love Grows (Where My Rosemary Goes)” and its indelible, hopeful riff; “Give My Heart a Break” has something similar, except it’s softer, slightly more melancholy, and is even more ardent than its older counterpart.
It’s such a mesmerising hook that only later do the words she’s singing filter through your head. This is good, because you do NOT want to read the lyrics beforehand: they aren’t as execrable as some Eurovision entries have gotten, but they’re still pretty bad. Observe the following: “just need to have a little fun tonight, so tell me lies”. “What is our destination?”. And “Know I’m not the only/ Waiting for a sigh-yign”. Only what? Person? Human? Traffic warden? The lack of a direct object in that sentence bothers me. It’s not even difficult to write a suitable lyric for that melody; coming up with a better equivalent took me all of fifteen seconds. But here’s the thing: there are also moments where that clumsiness hits on a simplicity that just feels right. Take for example the lines “the world has gone a little bit too cold/ Don’t know what’s fake, don’t know what’s real” — amidst a growing epidemic of loneliness and isolation, surely everyone living in the year 2024 knows a little about how that feels. And I empathise so much when she sings “I’ve been feeling lonely, I’ve been feeling down”: it’s nothing special, in fact it’s so overused these days that there should be a worldwide ban on anybody utilising it ever again, but when she sang it, I still nodded my head silently and thought, “yes”.
In fact, it’s because the lyrics are so abysmal that the song takes on a life on its own. Every sentence in this song is fragmented and shattered, its surface meaning all over the place. But rather than turning me off, I’ve found myself actively trying to build something out of the chaos, trying to make sense from nonsense. I am fully aware that there is no greater meaning behind lines like “wanna be weightless like a butterfly”, yet I can’t help but speculate: why on Earth did she say that? How did she come to this? For me, this song is so sparse that it becomes a DIY job: watching her earnestly croon the lyrics onstage, “Give My Heart a Break” — both title and phrase — transforms from simple pop song into lament of a person exhausted by all the heartaches she’s had. (It’s probably not the meaning Cazzi Opeia intended when writing the song — in fact, I’m not sure she intended anything at all — but it sounds like one to me.)
But that only goes halfway to explaining the song’s hold on my heart. Songs about romantic exhaustion are a dime a dozen, and Lord knows I’m already despondent enough about my own constant loneliness. But there’s still something magical about the way Cazzi Opeia voices it, something ineffable about the way everything comes together as she launches herself into the chorus, her voice somewhere in the murky overlap between hope and sorrow. As she coos “so give my heart a bre-e-e-e-e-e-ak…”, her voice falls and stumbles down the notes of that intoxicating hook, taking us on yet another rollercoaster ride; you can hear the very emotions battling it out in her voice, wresting for control while above her the skies burst into a thousand different colours. It is a battle that never gets won: you can almost hear all the pressure and frustration as she sings “not a single drop, got no more tears! To! Cry!”, yet those last three words — a blatant lie if there ever was one — are always the most beautiful moments the song has to offer.
And it is in those ephemeral moments of beauty, so amateurish and yet so genuine, that the song really takes flight. Cazzi Opeia’s not a great performer — sometimes her voice strains to reach the high notes, and her face seems stuck in an eternal performance of pained sincerity — but when she steps back and lets the backing vocals cascade over her, she transforms into the most relatable person alive. To the sound of her repeated pleas, distorted and interrupted by electronic bleeps and bloops, she dances around onstage, looking every inch like a goofy teenage girl dancing inside her room while playing out wish-fulfilling scenarios in her head (a la Taylor Swift in “You Belong with Me”). Every time I watch that part, I find myself mesmerised; those dance moves of hers might be really, really basic, but all the same there’s an earnest aloofness to them that somehow just seals the deal. It’s almost as if I could see myself in that position, dancing like that, my mind awash in the most romantic situations imaginable.
So when that finale arrives, when the stage explodes into a gaudy display of pink and yellow (seriously, the person who made that particular aesthetic decision should be fired, I don’t care if it was Cazzi Opeia herself), it doesn’t sound like a recycle of a motif that’s been used way too many times. It doesn’t sound like the last, desperate plea of a person who’s been devastated by heartbreak. Quite the opposite: it sounds like the ultimate triumph of someone who’s found the escape hatch, and is finally flying away towards her own happiness. Perhaps it’s all a little too good to be true, but it’s hard not to look at her state of bliss, at all the fantastic dreamy things she’s experienced on the way and her apparent sense of freedom, and not envy her even a little. After all, it is us who ends the performance on the dark side of a keyhole.
This is the fifth year I’ve written a piece on 2 April. For the past four years I’ve written about songs I unequivocally love: from the heartsick loneliness of “Here Is the News” to the resignation of “Golden Years”, to the one-two-thrill-four of “I Saw Her Standing There”. All of these tunes are stone-cold classics: they’ve been around for years, and their appeal has been discussed and affirmed by literal generations of writers. By contrast, “Give My Heart a Break” has, as of this writing, been out for a grand total of six weeks, and has been received with the collective shrug that greets most Melodifestivalen entrants; already it is slowly receding into the background, subsumed into the sea of pop songs that emerge daily from Swedish music studios. It is highly doubtful that anyone, with the possible exception of Cazzi Opeia herself, will even remember its existence by this time next year.
And that includes me. For even as I celebrate the masterful pop craft of Moa “Cazzi Opeia” Carlebecker, I know already that after a while “Give My Heart a Break” will fade from my mind — even now, a couple of weeks after I first heard the song, I have to remind myself to listen to it. This is the never-ending story of pop: today’s favourites will sooner or later be replaced by tomorrow’s, and in time I will probably wonder why I ever liked the song in the first place. Pop music is by nature ephemeral — the name itself is the sound of something fizzling and disappearing. It is here for a moment, and then it is gone; the ones which have survived years and decades are the lucky few, the ones which managed by luck or payola or their own merit to wedge themselves into everybody’s minds, past and present. This song does not matter much in the fabric of pop, which itself — despite repeated attempts to prove otherwise — does not matter much in the greater fabric of the world.
Which brings me back to this song and my choice to discuss it, instead of the ABC, or the The Sundays. Every time I’ve written about a song in the past (and especially on 2 April), it’s been with the belief that the song I’m writing about is “the one”. To me, these songs are ones that have something to say, ones that reveal some deep secret about love or humanity; there is a part of me that intensely wishes that this song I’m thinking about, this song that I’ve fallen incontrovertibly in love with, holds the key to my current situation. If I could just get to the bottom of what makes me relate to this song, I would think, then perhaps I might get a step closer to understanding what true happiness looks like. I wasn’t going to get that out of an unremarkable, silly little song like “Give My Heart a Break”, was I?
But that’s naïve thinking: popular songs do not hold the key to happiness, any more than TV shows, self-help books, or pornography do. However hard I might pin my hopes on Paul McCartney’s latest attempt to assure me that everything will be alright, the fact remains that what pop music offers is a temporary respite, a few pretty moments where the world explodes into colour — and then nothing. But what these songs all have in common is that they DO give us happiness, for a brief moment, right here right now — and that is what matters, is it not? The fact that the joy brought by pop music is not everlasting does not mean that the fleeting, unmemorable songs are in any way disposable: they soothe our hearts and minds, and they give us ways to articulate what we do not feel: not just in the lyrics, but also in the tune itself, and even the way it is sung. I’m not saying that we should all stop pursuing a more constant form of happiness or contentment, and just hedonistically embrace everything that is disposable or mediocre — but I am saying that it wouldn’t hurt to recognise value, and more importantly stuff that makes us happy, wherever it exists.
So to recap: “Give My Heart a Break” is not Cazzi Opeia’s best work. It is not even the best song that she has sung at, or contributed to, Melodifestivalen. But despite its questionable quality, I still love every little thing about this song: the delicious hook, the self-insert lyrics, even the singer’s bliss just cannot be denied. It’s not the most important song in the world, nor am I likely to think about it much compared to all the other songs; but that suits me just fine, and I’m glad it exists at all. I’d love to see Cazzi Opeia represent Sweden at Eurovision someday — not this year of course, even if it’s not my cup of tea Marcus & Martinus’ “Unforgettable” won it fair and square. But her song has made one young human on the other side of the world very happy (actually, two, because I showed it to Chels the other day and she loved it as well) — and if you ask me, that’s a sign of a true pop masterpiece right there already.
(Cover by Starchild Productions; “Give My Heart a Break”, performed by Cazzi Opeia and written by Ellen Berg, Jimmy Jansson, Moa Carlebecker and Thomas G:son is utilised here for criticism and review.)
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