Aktuelle Hits verstehen: "Jar of Hearts" von Christina Perri
Many music stars today seem slightly unreal. Lady Gaga and her crazy costumes, Rihanna and her colourful hair, Beyoncé and her perfect beauty. Modern stars create personas for themselves as if they were playing a role in a movie - and they change that movie every couple of months. But once in a while along comes a star who is normal, someone who isn't playing a role. The kind of person who could live in the same street as you or who you might know from school. Someone real. The singer, Christina Perri, is one of those stars.
Christina's recent rise to stardom happened very quickly, but not without a long wait before it. Like most musicians, Christina began singing at an early age and her parents encouraged her musical talent. She wrote her first songs when she was fifteen, "when I first fell in love", as she explained in an interview. Aged 21 she packed her bags and moved to Los Angeles where she began producing music and got married.
Things soon went wrong and the marriage ended after only eighteen months. A disaster. Christina returned to her home town of Philadelphia where she worked as a waitress and wrote a song that would later bring her to stardom: "Jar of Hearts". Like many songs, it's about a broken heart and the jar which the heart-breaker collects them in. Unlike many other songs, it has wonderful lyrics: "No, I can't take one more step towards you / 'cause all that's waiting is regret / And don't you know, I'm not your ghost anymore / You lost the love I loved the most."
Central to the song is the question "who do you think you are?" Christina goes on to pose the question in the chorus, which also gives the song its title: "Who do you think you are / running around leaving scars / collecting your jar of hearts / and tearing love apart?" Christina Perri's young life can teach us all a lesson: Even when your dreams and hopes are shattered, there's always light at the end of the tunnel. Great songs, it seems, often come from broken hearts.
Vokabeln
once in a while = ab und zu;
rise to stardom = Aufstieg zum Ruhm;
to encourage = unterstützen;
to go wrong = schiefgehen;
waitress = Kellnerin;
jar = Glasgefäß;
to collect = sammeln;
regret = Bedauern;
ghost = Geist;
scar = Narbe;
to tear apart = auseinanderreißen;
shattered = zerstört
