Sometimes, singers openly dislike their own music. For example, Toni Braxton didn’t think “Un-Break My Heart” was right for her. She turned out to be right and wrong at the same time.
Toni Braxton wished ‘Un-Break My Heart’ was sexier
During a 2016 interview with the New York Post, Braxton revealed what she thought when she first heard “Un-Break My Heart.” “I heard the song [and] I thought, ‘This is nice, it’s all right,’” she said. “[My record producers] said, ‘We think this is a smash.’”
The ballad was a little too PG for Braxton. “I knew I wanted to change my image and be a little sexier,” she said. “It was strategic to be an [adult contemporary] artist because of the texture of my voice, but I wanted to be 25 years old. I thought ‘Un-Break My Heart’ would put me back in the same category of being an adult contemporary artist.”
Braxton noted that her management was correct when they clocked “Un-Break My Heart” as a smash. “But they turned out to be right,” she adds. “I didn’t want to do it, but I did it, and it was the biggest thing in my career.”
Weezer took Toni Braxton’s signature song in a different direction
While Braxton’s issue with “Un-Break My Heart” was its sexlessness, that wasn’t the real problem with the song. Her voice on the track is excellent but the instrumental doesn’t live up to it. She tries to bear her soul on “Un-Break My Heart,” but the instrumentation seems uninterested in her relationships. The beat needed to be a little more melodramatic.
“Un-Break My Heart” is precisely the sort of song that could have used a little more rock in it. Notably, Weezer recorded a version of the ballad for their album Death to False Metal. Their cover has some heavy guitars that give the track a little more life than the original, but it still needed a little more 1980s power ballad energy. Beyond that, Rivers Cuomo was categorically the wrong singer for this sort of song. After all these years, “Un-Break My Heart” is still begging for someone to come along and fix it.
‘Un-Break My Heart’ blew up and then faded away
Despite its issues, “Un-Break My Heart” was still the biggest song of Braxton’s career. The ballad topped the Billboard Hot 100 for a whopping 11 weeks, lasting on the chart for 42 weeks in total. By comparison, Braxton’s other chart-topper, “You’re Makin’ Me High”/”Let It Flow,” was only No. 1 for one week. “Un-Break My Heart” appeared on the album Secrets. That record reached No. 2 on the Billboard 200 and lasted on the chart for 92 weeks.
While “Un-Break My Heart” was a massive success in the 1990s, it seems like it’s fading from our cultural memory. Unlike other easy-listening smashes from the era, like Whitney Houston’s “I Will Always Love You” or Celine Dion’s “My Heart Will Go On,” “Un-Break My Heart” wasn’t attached to a hit movie that could keep it alive. And that’s a shame because if we all forget the song, the right artist will never come along to fix it.
Braxton didn’t love “Un-Break My Heart,” but, for a while, the public did.
