Toronto singer/songwriter Megan Bonnell’s vibrant and heartfelt “Your Voice” reflects on love, grief, and purpose with an engaging burst of buoyant energy.
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“What is love if you don’t have it with the one you love?” Megan Bonnell projects in her new music video. It’s a question often asked in the wake of breakups – the sobering statement of a broken heart slowly on the mend. Love doesn’t end quietly; it’s a residual pain, an ache that burns in the background while life takes its daily course. Wrestling through the end of a relationship, Megan Bonnell’s vibrant and heartfelt “Your Voice” reflects on love, grief, and purpose with an engaging burst of buoyant energy.
Your voice, it reminds me of salt water
As it rolls up on the beach to touch my feet
Your voice, it is the sound of many days gone by
When there was something left to say
How can I find the voice
To take them out of me
There’s so much left to see
Of this love with you and me
It can’t be over now
You belong to me
As the salt does the sea
You’re a wildflower to me
Atwood Magazine is proud to be premiering the music video for “Your Voice,” taken from Toronto singer/songwriter Megan Bonnell’s third album Separate Rooms (released April 6, 2018 via Cadence Music). With over 170,000 streams on Spotify alone, “Your Voice” is a breakaway and rising hit off Bonnell’s recent album – and for good reason. The song is something of an anomaly – a happy-sounding breakup/love song that seems to embrace one’s ex-partner as much as it does oneself. Tenderness, anxiety, and empathy rage a mighty storm within as Bonnell crafts a multi-faceted observation of the broken heart.
We’re invited to join Bonnell’s catchy turmoil in the chorus, indulging in an intense rhetorical question that brings us intimately close to the artist’s heart:
What is love. What is love. What is love
If you don’t have it with the one you love
What is trust. What is trust. What is trust
If you don’t have it with the one you must
It’s alright it’s alright
I know you think that I shouldn’t love you
Just make it right
But not tonight
“Your Voice is about unresolved feelings of a lost love and how they can haunt us,” Megan Bonnell tells Atwood Magazine. “You playback the memories in your head over and over again to the point of distortion. Often when we breakup with someone, the knee jerk reaction is to grasp at the remnants of something that is not worth fighting for. This song journeys through grief into the enlightenment that allows us to move on.”
She continues, “The concept of “Your Voice” started on the piano in my kitchen. I liked the idea of a punchy syncopated piano riff as the backbone for a love song. When we got into the studio, we sped it up and added different layers of sound; bold electric guitar and crunchy synth parts to try and capture the energy of early 80’s music like Michael Jackson or Hall and Oates. It felt like an interesting and different way for me to communicate my feelings about this particular relationship. The video is made up of both concert footage, and scenes we filmed at a bar called Emmet Ray in Toronto. I really wanted to include footage of the band considering how important the entire sound of the band is to this song and album as a whole. The parts of me dancing in the bar, are meant to capture the experience that myself and many up and coming artists experience, spending a lot of time working jobs in the service industry day dreaming about making and playing music.”
Today, going to be better than yesterday
I wouldn’t have it any other way
You will pay for breaking all the parts of my heart
Into a million pieces on the ground
This time I will be stronger
I will fight harder
This will last longer
“Your Voice” could be slowed down into a painfully affecting ballad. It could tear at our heartstrings as the artist wrenches open her soul and floods our ears with that unending ache that so often accompanies breakup. Yet instead of dwelling in darkness, Bonnell turns “Your Voice” into a proclamation of the self – an uplifting and spirited anthem of a heart on the mend.
Every loving relationship is special and unique, and deserves to be treated as such. When something so meaningful comes to an ending, abruptly or otherwise, it’s worth taking the time to go through it: To give it the burial it rightfully deserves, even if its finale looms largely over all else. Megan Bonnell and “Your Voice” find a way of saying goodbye that is as emphatic and engaging as it is emotionally cathartic: We get the closure we desire, alongside a fitting tribute to love and its enduring impact.
Stream “Your Voice” exclusively on Atwood Magazine, and listen to Megan Bonnell’s engaging and passionate third album Separate Rooms, out now!
What is love. What is love. What is love
If you don’t have it with the one you love
What is trust. What is trust. What is trust
If you don’t have it with the one you must
What is home. What is home. What is home
If you don’t have it when you’re all alone
What is faith, what is faith
If you don’t have it when you’ve been misplaced
Stream: “Your Voice” – Megan Bonnell
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? © Jen Squires
