Unbreakable Heart by Carlene Carter

Album: Little Love Letters (1993)

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Songfacts®:

Written by Benmont Tench, who is the keyboard player in Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers, this song finds Carter telling a man that God can make anything out of nothing, but God has never made an unbreakable heart and probably never will. She wants him to know that he has to be careful with her because God didn't make her with an unbreakable heart. >>>
Suggestion credit:
Kara - Wichita, KS
Benmont Tench wrote this song when he was going through a divorce. He and Carter are good friends, and the day after he wrote the song, he called her and asked if she wanted to record it. Tench had been working with Carter on her Little Love Letters album, so he brought her the song and they recorded it that day. "I just got my hands on it before anybody else did," Carter explained in her Songfacts interview. "It's a brilliant song and when he played it to me on the guitar and sang it to me, I was just blown away."
"Unbreakable Heart" was a phrase Benmont Tench saw on a billboard. He and a friend agreed to each write a song with that title; what started out as exercise became a very personal song. In our interview with Tench, he said: "It just so happened that it really connected with me in an emotional way. I think I was thinking of 'True Love Ways' when I wrote that song but I wasn't consciously going, I'm going to write a song like that. I think those were just the spirits in the air."
Carter was a bit intimidated by this song when she first heard it, but she knew it was a great song so she summoned up the courage to sing it. "It was rangey for me, but I loved it so much," she told us.
The Little Love Letters album was co-produced by Howie Epstein, who was the bass player in Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers and Carter's boyfriend at the time. He was best friends with Benmont Tench, so when Benmont wrote the song, he took it to Epstein to get his opinion and find out if Carter would be interested in recording it. Epstein loved the song and had Carter record it for the album.
Jessica Andrews recorded a popular version of this song on her 1999 album Heart Shaped World.
The music video was directed by Greg Gold, who has a thing for beaches. He also directed the beach-themed videos for Smokey Robinson's "One Heartbeat" and "Just To See Her."

Comments: 1

Trond Are Pedersen from Hammerfest, NorwayProbably one of the most heartbreaking songs I`ve ever heard. I`ll never forget the first time I heard it on the radio. It was something about the lyrics and the chord structure of the song that made me turn the radio up and listen till the song finished to find out who sang it. This was in 2000 and it remains one of my favourite songs to this day. A song which proves the vulnerability in us all.

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