EDDIE RAY ARNOLD

                                                              "You Were Worth The Heartbreak" 

                                                              Emanant Music

2022 has been a monumental year of positive movement for country artist Eddie Ray Arnold. On the back of highly praised singles “Rock Your World” and “What If I Don’t,” he took the massive leap of faith and relocated to Nashville where he quickly engrained himself deeper into the vibrant Music City scene and began to find his support circle.

To cap of what has already been an impressively strong year, Arnold now releases his latest effort “You Were Worth The Heartbreak.”

Keeping in line with his 90’s country signatures, but also testing the waters a bit as he moves into more of a modern kissed production, the big crescendo instrumentation that opens the song instantly grabs your attention as it pushes into the mid-tempo drive allowing his voice to slide in and take over as he begins to paint the story through the opening verse.

Placing you alongside of him at Reggie’s Bar in Baton Rouge, he sings of a girl with her blonde hair pulled back and an LSU Tigers t-shirt on who walked in and immediately captured his attention, who he would end up talking to all night long as he would reveal just a few lines later.

However, just when you start to think that this is another song about a guy flirting with a girl at the bar, Arnold masterfully twists away from that notion and into something with so much more depth than that as he gut-punches the pre-chorus with the two lines that change the entire dynamic of the song: 

“And even though we’re through

I’m glad I fell for you.”

We then see him confessing through the chorus that all the pain, the can’t eat, the can’t sleep, and the front porch bleeding as he watched her leave was all worth it as he admits that he’d do it all over again because as the hook states, “you were worth the heartbreak.”

The instrumentation throughout the remainder of the song sees the guitars kick a little heavier into the rhythm to perfectly match the lyrics as Arnold, like so many of us do, begins to relive all the little moments that they shared that matter the most now that he’s looking back on them:

“Pillow talks at 3AM” 

“Backroad rides holding your hand”

While this is certainly Eddie Ray Arnold putting an exclamation point on a great year with what is arguably his most solid release to date, it’s also him putting a comma at the end of 2022 as he foreshadows that exciting direction that we can expect from him in 2023.

(Review Written By: Jeffrey Kurtis)

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