The Singles Bar: Megan O’Neill can live ‘Without’ your half-hearted love
The Irish performer disassembles a forlorn lover.
Welcome to The Singles Bar, a review series focused on new single and song releases.
Scars operate in twofold: sworn badges of honor burnt into our skin and eternal specters of one heartbreak’s sting. Cupid’s heart-shaped aim isn’t always perfect, and we inevitably have that one break-up that broke us down completely. Some of country’s greatest haven’t been immune to suffering’s sweet kiss either, from Hank Williams’ weepy bar-room ballad “I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry” to Patsy Cline‘s scornful and withered “Strange,” and with each turn at the microphone, pain in every shade is on paralyzing display. Irish-bred singer-songwriter Megan O’Neill, who now resides in London and is readying her debut album, tosses her ink-dotted misery onto the pile with her new single “Without,” a glassy, ’90s-built mid-tempo uncovering her brushes with a lukewarm lover.
“We both know you don’t have time to care about anyone else,” she spits in the opening stanza, framing the song as not only a vulnerable confession but a scorched-earth kiss-off. “Time is all we got / And you took mine while I was trying to make this something that it’s not.” O’Neill licks her wounds ceremoniously while shredding a relationship she long believed was a two-way street, doubling down on grit and a resolve to end the vicious cycle. “If I can’t have you, you can’t have me / ‘Cause it’s all or nothing, there’s nothing in between,” she moves on the chorus, dancing along word play in sharp, jaunty fashion. “If you’re half-way in, I’m half-way out / Baby, we can’t shine in a shadow of a doubt.”
“Without,” co-written with Jeff Cohen (Sugarland, The Band Perry) and Victoria Banks (Lauren Alaina, Sara Evans), samples O’Neill’s forthcoming Ghost of You (pre-order now), a debut textured with what she describes as a “few years worth of journaling.”
Grade: 3 out of 5
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