The Singles Bar: Sam DeRosa isn’t so ‘Hard to Love’

Welcome to The Singles Bar, a review series focused on new single and song releases.

Relationships on their last legs can be detrimental to your health. You might want for it to be different, but the truth is, the chances are it’ll never be what it once was. You revisit a relationship’s twilight hours in the hopes of forcing something or someone to realizing their habits are making things worse. Of course, we can’t begrudge anyone holding on to the bitter end. Sam DeRosa, a pop newcomer out of Los Angeles, gives it one last go, entering the ring with her boxing gloves waxed and shiny, ready and capable to deliver the punches if need be. “Hard to Love” is as delightfully chewy as most of what you’ll discover on Top 40, but there’s something solemn, grim even, about the lyrics, delivered in a voice switching between feathered ends and weighty, left-hook determination. “You’re so hard to love,” she howls between measured percussion splashes and a saucy, disco-lean.

“So, can you cry just a little?” she probes, almost taunting her other half into giving even half his heart up. “Can you try just a little?” It’s almost like talking to a  brick wall, really, and while she does expose parts of herself, she keeps her heart closely guarded behind a steel cage. “We’ve all had that person who, no matter how much we should, we can’t quit yet; where we need one more honest shot before we can walk away,” the singer-songwriter says about the song. “This song was my last step into the ring, where I really laid it all out on the line and said what I needed to say.”

By the end, you get the sense DeRosa has thrown in the towel. But she’s not defeated. Oh, to the contrary. She’s even more fired-up and walks away with a new-found sense of independence and self-worth. She avoided sacrificing her entire being for a loser, and instead, she took out the trash before it was too late. She adds, “I kind of blacked out because the emotion was real, raw and fast. I had a huge fight with the guy I was dating, and he hung up on me. I remember my blood boiling, but it was because I knew he was shutting down for the wrong reasons.”

Fuck that guy.

Grade: 4 out of 5

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