Message from your Heart

Kina Grannis was the winner of the Doritos Crash the Super Bowl contest, where she was given a deal with Interscope Records. She is an extremely talented artist whose songs are not just for easy listening. The creator of her website said, “Her lyrics tell a story, spill out emotions, and confront the eccentricities of life. Kina's ability to parallel the delicate nuances of her melodies with poignant observations on life, love and the many uses of pennies is superseded only by her transcendent voice, which rivals that of many of today's popular musicians.” After watching the video and listening to the lyrics of this song, one can easily agree with this statement.

The song, entitled “Message from your Heart,” is about a heart talking to the person that encompasses it. How she thought of this song is truly beyond me. The first two lines set the mood for the rest of the song. The heart wants it known that it is the source of all your emotions, more specifically the two polar opposites: love and misery. The heart lets us know when we are in love, and when we are completely miserable. Without the heart, we wouldn’t feel anything, according to the heart that is. I would like to argue that the heart in this song is extremely boastful and selfish. It thinks it runs the show! It goes on and on about all the things it does for you and you give it no credit whatsoever. The heart thinks its time for the person to start taking care of it.

Kina paints beautiful illustrations of the heart and what its functions are. It gives the listener a new way to look at the heart besides just pumping blood in and out all day long. The heart works 24/7 while you are sleeping and awake. When you aren’t active, it’s still working. One line says “I don’t work for free, please take care of me.” All the heart wants is to be taken care of because it takes of you. Not working for free means that it has no choice but to give life to the person it beats in.

When it says, “Don’t break me I bleed constantly,” it not only means literally pumping blood constantly, but also bleeding in pain. It gets no brake, no day off. It has no other job except providing life. It is completely devoted to its host, no questions asked. However, it does have a simply request: for everything that it does for you, the least you could do is to take care of it. Taking care of it could mean a number of things, including eating healthy so you won’t have a heart attack. But I’m sure, in this song, it is referring to your love life. Don’t put yourself in a situation where the heart has to be in more pain than it already is in.

The main thing I took from this song is that the heart is constantly reminding you that it’s the center of your life. It maintains your life. It wants gratitude. It wants to be taken care of, because it so graciously takes care of you. I do think it is being quite selfish in its request. The heart makes it appear that it is the only thing in your body when in fact there are tons of other organs vital to your survival. In reality, the heart has nothing to do with your emotions at all, your brain does. But no one thinks the brain is a cute organ. Who says you broke my brain? I have a brain ache! People refer to their heart breaking when they are hurt because they feel like want to die when they lose something they love, and if your heart is literally broken and not functionally, you will die. Therefore, that is where the heart metaphor arose.