Marie Hines

Story Behind The Songs: “Hammer” 

I’m often asked where I get inspiration for my songs.  Most of the songs I write are based on personal experiences- falling in love, falling out of love, graduating college and not knowing what to do with my life or how to get HERE- most of the time, I write what I know.  Every once in a while, however, I’ll get a random spike of inspiration from an unlikely source.  “Hammer” was born from a book I read.  I was making my way through the book “Heart Of The Matter” by Emily Griffin, and could not tear my eyes from the pages.  Emily is a fabulous writer (one of my favorites), and her style of character painting is like no one else’s, but I was absolutely hating the book.  Not because of her writing, but because of the subject matter- this book was written on the subject of cheating.  Now, I know that no one likes the subject of cheating and no one wants to be cheated on, but there is a special little fiery place in my being that gets extremely worked up over the subject of cheating.  Whether I’m watching a movie, listening to the story of a friend, or reading a book (as in this case), you can be sure that I will burn inside the minute a cheater is mentioned.  So here I am, curled up with this book with a fire in my belly, but not able to put it down (it was kinda like watching a car crash- you know you shouldn’t watch, but you just can’t turn away).  I finally finished the book, but by that point I was so worked up that I contemplated returning the book and telling Davis Kidd’s exactly what I thought of it! After casting the book to the wayside and a couple of days of grumbling, I sat down at the piano and this song came out.  And I suppose I can admit- I’ve made peace with the book.  (And again- please note, as a disclaimer to Emily- the book really is great, I’m just insensibly sensitive to the subject… Go pick it up at your local bookstore and see the original source of inspiration!)

So here is the song, “Hammer”- it’s track #5 on my HeartCrash project.  Listen to it in this blog post, if you want to keep it as your own, you can purchase it on iTunes here: http://itunes.apple.com/us/album/heartcrash-ep/id502120570 

Keep an eye out, I’ll post the stories for the rest of the songs one by one…

Happy Saturday!

marie