The Song That Was Never Meant to Be Sung Alone | Cracked Bottles, Broken Hearts Behind the Music
Updated: Oct 9
There's a song in my show that a whole company sings together, and until now, nobody outside a rehearsal room had ever heard it any other way.
Speakeasy is a jazz musical I wrote, book, music, and lyrics, about the Velvet Boot, a secret club built by a community who needed exactly one room in the world where they got to stand up straight and be entirely themselves, after spending every other room making themselves small. Drag performers. Butch bartenders. Queer musicians. Flappers who'd found the one floor that would have them. For two acts, that room is the only safe thing in the story.
Then it isn't. The Velvet Boot gets raided. Not a metaphor, an actual raid, the kind that really happened to rooms exactly like this one, and Act One ends with the place torn apart.
Act Two opens on what's left. And the first thing anyone does, before a single line of dialogue, is sing.
What a company does with grief that size
Cracked Bottles, Broken Hearts is that opening number. In the show, it isn't one character processing what happened, it's everyone, all at once, because that's genuinely the only way grief that large gets carried. You don't hand a loss like that to one person and ask them to hold it. You put it in a room full of voices and let the weight distribute.
That's the whole design of the number. Four different members of the company each take a verse, four different specific costs, before the choruses pull every voice back into one. The set is in pieces around them, glass on the floor, the bandstand cracked, the piano keys stained. A dancer limps across the stage on one heel. And the response isn't a monologue about grief, it's a room full of people singing through the wreckage together, each carrying their own piece of it, because singing together is what this community has always known how to do.
For this recording, I wanted to find out what happens if you take that away.
One voice, one piano, and everything that used to hold it up
Every other version of this song has a company behind it. This recording has exactly two things in the room: my voice, and a piano. No harmonies to stack under a hard note. No other voice to trade the melody to when mine gets tired. Whatever a whole community was built to carry together, I wanted to know what it actually felt like to carry entirely alone.
It's a genuinely different experience of the same song. Not smaller. Just unshared. There's a version of "Cracked Bottles, Broken Hearts" where the grief has forty places to go, and this is the version where it has one.
That's also the shape of Sessions from the Velvet Boot, the series this single opens: songs from Speakeasy reimagined as intimate live performances. The arrangement changes song to song, sometimes a full band, sometimes just this, a voice and a piano in an otherwise empty room. This one happens to sit at the spare end of that range, on purpose, because the song asked for it.
Four people, four verses, one room
I want to walk through this one properly, because in the show it isn't one voice telling one story. It's four different members of the company, each taking a verse, each singing the specific thing this room cost them and gave them, before the choruses pull all four into one.
Verse one belongs to a Black drag queen, wearing her drag mother's pearls, wanting to shine, and getting the mirror smashed for it. That's not an abstract image. That's what happens to something delicate the moment somebody decides it's a threat. She says it plainly: still, I shimmer, still I wait. Not defeated. Just waiting for a room that will let her.
Verse two is the priest, the one who secretly plays piano for this room every night his church doesn't know about. He watched from the pews, mouthed the prayers, and found no God and no mercy there, only in this room, all flash and sound, does he find where the holy's actually found. That's a man who spent his whole vocation in the wrong building, and it took a queer speakeasy to show him where the sacred was really hiding.
Verse three is a Black dancer, one of the drag and gender-nonconforming performers who give this company its shape, who danced here to feel like she belonged, only to have boots and batons prove otherwise the night of the raid. She refuses to be made small anyway. Keeps her head up through it, because the alternative is letting them win twice.
Verse four is Frankie "The Tank," the butch bartender who keeps the room standing, and this is the one that undid me a little while I was arranging it. She's back behind the bar the morning after everything's destroyed, and the lyric repeats itself in almost the same breath: I poured their drinks with steady hands, made their drinks to make a stand. Read fast, it sounds like a stutter. It isn't. That's a woman doing the most ordinary thing in the world again, on purpose, specifically because once wasn't enough to prove to herself it wasn't an accident. Nobody applauds a bartender for pouring a drink. She does it anyway, twice in one breath, because someone has to keep proving the room isn't finished.
Four different costs. A Black drag queen's visibility. A priest's faith. A Black dancer's body. A bartender's labor. The raid took something different from each of them, and the song lets every one of them say so, in their own verse, before the chorus pulls all four voices back into one.
This isn't a period piece I researched from the outside. I'm queer, and I've spent my own life building rooms where I could stop translating myself for the people in them, and watching exactly what happens the moment one gets taken away. The Pansy Craze didn't teach me that feeling. It gave me a documented history for something I'd already lived.
Then, right after Frankie's verse, before the final chorus, there's a stretch with no words at all. Just voice, climbing from a belt into falsetto and back, no lyric to hide behind, no single character's story to carry it. I didn't plan that moment as a vocal display. It's what happens when four people's language runs out at the same time and the feeling is still going. Some griefs don't have a next line. They just have a sound, and for a few bars, it belongs to everyone at once.
Further back than the show
This song, and the whole world it comes from, traces back further than the stage. I didn't invent a fascination with music made in rooms that had to hide what they were. That came from somewhere, a long time before I ever sat down to write a note of this show, and it's part of why a real, mostly-erased history sits underneath a fictional club I built to honor it. I'm not the first person in my family to love a sound the world outside the room would have punished. I just might be the first one who got to sing it without the door closed.
That's a longer story than this post is the place for. It's the one running through everything I'm putting into the world this month, and if you want the fuller version, it's coming.
How I actually record any of this
I'm Deaf. I went deaf as an adult, and it didn't end how I make music, it rebuilt the whole method. I record the instrumental foundation first, the piano, so I can feel and monitor it through vibration before anything else joins it. My body is the studio monitor. When something's wrong, the hair on my arms tells me before I can name why. When it's right, heat climbs up through my chest and the back of my neck.
Then I perform the vocal live over that foundation. The elements are captured separately because that's the accessible way for me to control the performance, not because the voice is any less real.
What you hear is a live vocal performance, mine, in real time, over a foundation I built by feel.
This one asked something slightly different of that process, because there was nowhere left to hide once the arrangement was this bare. Just the piano, and a voice that had to carry alone what a full company usually shares between them.
The full lyrics of Cracked Bottle, Broken Hearts, new Broadway Music from Speakeasy
Printed here in full, not just linked, the same as everything else this year, because a recording does not reach every listener and a Deaf artist printing his own lyrics is part of the work.
Verse 1
I wore my mother's pearls last night,
Said, let me shine, shine so bright.
But they crushed the mirror with their hate.
Still, I shimmer. Still, I wait.
Verse 2
I watched from pews, I mouthed their prayer,
But found no God or mercy there.
It took this place, all flash and sound,
To show me where the holy's found.
Chorus
Cracked bottles, broken hearts,
Nothing left but shattered parts.
They raided bars, they bruised our skin...
But still our breath fights deep within.
Verse 3
I danced to feel like I belonged,
But boots and batons proved me wrong.
They want me silent, want me small,
But I keep my head up through it all.
Verse 4
I poured their drinks with steady hands,
Made their drinks to make a stand.
But still I hear their boots and lies,
Yet I've still got fire in my eyes.
Chorus
Cracked bottles, broken hearts,
But still we gather, defiance sparked.
But even broken glass can gleam,
And truth survives in whispered dreams
Bridge
We're the ghosts they tried to hide,
The names they slurred, the truths denied.
They shattered glass. But life restarts
With cracked bottles... and one brave heart...
Final Chorus
Cracked bottles, broken hearts,
But still we sing, still we start.
From pain, from loss, we know it well,
We rise again... and fight like hell.
Cracked Bottles, Broken Hearts (Live) is out October 9,
the first entry in Sessions from the Velvet Boot.
Pre-save it now so it lands in your library the moment it drops. 🎧
Cracked Bottles Broken Hearts Cracked Bottles Broken Hearts Behind the Music
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