“A poet is a nightingale who sits in darkness and sings to cheer its own solitude with sweet sounds.” ― Percy Bysshe Shelley Breaking up with someone you truly loved is one of the hardest things to do. To actively break up things, like dividing up furniture, pets, photos – and even friends – keeps the excruciating pain out of reaching distance for a while. But after the sorting out is done and the fights are over, the wounds heal only very slowly and the feeling of despair and tragedy smothers your life like a grey, wet blanket for a very long time. The ballad “When Love Falls Apart” grew out of exactly these feelings of deep melancholy. For me it is still a very emotional song to sing when I'm performing live because every time it brings up all of these old and painful feelings and memories. Ironically, however, the song marks both an end and a beginning: “When Love Falls Apart” was the very first song Greg Porée, a versatile guitarist and jazz composer from Los Angeles, and I wrote together. I had almost completed the lyrics and had a hooky and suitable melody for the chorus but the verses were still incomplete. We took it from there: Greg came up with some lovely additional chords, the rest of the melody just wrote itself and the song was finished fairly quickly. I recorded the song and released it as a single after playing an unplugged show at the famous singer-songwriter music venue Genghis Cohen in Los Angeles: Accompanying me on classical guitar was my co-writer Greg. That evening, we played the ballad for the first time live. The way the song came to life and people connected to it, motivated me to record it as a single to just “get it out there”. Although I was already working on songs for my album it just felt right to release that version – just with voice and classical guitar. My design for the cover was inspired by a very tender and touching quote by Virginia Woolf. Melancholy is one theme that runs rampant through her writing. Her image of a singing bird amidst a moonscape depicts so well this pensive emotion into which both sorrow and joy, profoundness and beauty are woven. “The melancholy river bears us on. When the moon comes through the trailing willow boughs, I see your face, I hear your voice and the bird singing as we pass the osier bed. What are you whispering? Sorrow, sorrow. Joy, joy. Woven together, like reeds in moonlight.” – Virginia Woolf