Reba McEntire navigated euphoric highs and devastating lows between 1984 and 1991. Breaking through with 1984’s My Kind of Country, the Oklahoma native would notch 10 No. 1 hits before the decade’s end. In 1991, however, the “Fancy” singer suffered an unimaginable loss when seven members of her band and crew died in a plane crash in San Diego, California. Transmuting heartbreak into art, Reba released For My Broken Heart, her highest-selling album to date, on Oct. 1, 1991. On this day two months later, the album’s title track began a two-week run atop Billboard’s Hot Country Songs chart.
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Written by songwriters Keith Palmer and Liz Hengber, “For My Broken Heart” chronicles the immediate aftermath of a failed relationship, when going about your normal routine feels like sacrilege. So sure life wouldn’t go on without you / But, oh, this sun is blinding me / As it wakes me from the dark, Reba sings in the chorus. I guess the world didn’t stop / For my broken heart.
Reba initially planned to record the song as a duet with country singer Clint Black, but he was unavailable. So the 14-time ACM Award winner went solo.
“The loss of my band and tour manager got channeled into this album with every song, every lyric,” Reba recalled in a 2021 interview. “Leland Sklar was the bass player in that session, and he came in after about the fourth song that we recorded, and he said, ‘Reba, are we going to do any happy songs?’ And I looked up and I said, ‘Leland, not on this one.”
[RELATED: This Reba McEntire Song Will Break Your Heart With Just One Listen]
This Reba McEntire Classic Almost Didn’t Happen Because of a Clinique Bag
“For My Broken Heart” marked the first of two No. 1 hits from Reba McEntire’s 1991 album of the same name. However, songwriter Liz Hengber revealed during a 2021 appearance on the Bored and Curious Podcast with Mary Katz that it very nearly never happened at all.
The writing session that birthed “For My Broken Heart” was the first between Hengber and her songwriting partner, Keith Palmer. “I was going to cancel that appointment because I was so nervous and also Macy’s was having the Clinique sale,” she said. “I thought, ‘Wow, if I go to Macy’s now, I’ll be the first to get that Clinique bag.’… But something in me said, ‘No Liz, show up. Keith seems like a nice guy.’”
In the end, “I showed up for work and did not go get the Clinique bag,” Hengber confessed. She continued, ” I was a waitress who was obsessed with Clinique bags, but I went to that writing appointment and that writing appointment changed the course of my life.”
Featured image by Paul Natkin/Getty Images
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