I once wrote a breakup song too

This month, while digging through old music on a hard drive, I unearthed a demo with my own voice on it that I’d completely forgotten I’d ever made.

It was recorded during the most pathetic period of my life.

Back then, I was head over heels for a girl. Love at first sight. Even someone as afraid of rejection as me somehow mustered the courage to go after her, and against all odds, it worked.

Then, a week into the relationship, she said she wanted to focus on her career. I got dumped.

I went from heaven to hell in an instant.

Every day I was second-guessing everything. What did I do wrong? Where did I fall short? She never fully closed the door either. She left me these vague hints, like maybe it just wasn’t the right time, maybe there’d still be a chance later.

So I went full movie-protagonist mode and launched an all-out campaign to win her back. During this time I kept making grand confessions, writing long love letters, not realizing that the harder I tried, the needier I looked, and the messier things got. Looking back now, I was so far gone that even I wouldn’t want to be with me.

Around that time I’d just finished Andrew Huang’s music production course, and I’d briefly picked up the habit of jotting down lyrics. This demo came straight out of peak neediness.

That birdsong at the beginning? I was too depressed to sleep, heard beautiful birds outside my window at 5 AM, and hit record. Because it was 5 AM and I didn’t want to wake my roommate, I quietly hummed some melodies, stitched them together, and called it done. I never had the drive or the skill to turn it into a proper song after that, so it just sat on my hard drive until I forgot it existed entirely.

I even thought about sending the song to her, but I figured it wouldn’t change anything. Part of me fantasized about one of those satisfying romance-novel moments: the protagonist quietly does something impressive, the girl finds out, and feels a twinge of regret. But songwriting isn’t nearly that dramatic. You can’t really pull off a “look how talented I am, I made 9,999 paper roses for you” moment. It’s mostly self-indulgence, so it’s really no big deal.

It took me months to finally pick myself back up. I got back on dating apps. And not long after, I got lucky and met the woman who’s now my wife.

Her signals were always clear. I didn’t have to try hard to feel unconditionally liked. That’s when I realized: when someone actually likes you, they don’t keep sending mixed signals. They keep showing you, plainly and openly, that they’re into you. A month or two into dating, she told me she was so happy. I said I was too. For the first time, I knew what grounded, solid happiness felt like.

So I stopped second-guessing everything. Stopped being needy out of fear of losing someone. Growing up, I’d watched the adults around me and it seemed like not a single one of them had a happy marriage. That, combined with my pursuit of FIRE, had cemented my belief that I’d never marry or have kids. But even that conviction got overturned. I chose to get married.

The strange thing is, when you’re happy, you don’t feel like writing songs at all. When you’re miserable, the words pour out. No wonder Jay Chou’s best love songs were all the saddest, neediest ones from his early years before he got married.

Until now, no one had ever heard this song but me.

A few days ago, I fed it to AI. Still needy, but surprisingly not bad.

There’s still a lot that’s off¹, but it’s already way better than what I recorded back then. Just hearing AI sing my crude human slop to this level is a kind of happiness in itself. The rest can wait until AI gets better.

Six years have passed. I’m married with a kid now. I can finally look at this with some distance, from a third-person perspective, and share the breakup song I wrote back then.

The demo’s working title was “Without You Anyway.”

If I could write songs when I’m happy too, that nonexistent song would probably be called “Lucky to Have You.”²