Analysis Essay

Michelle Tapia

Professor Steven Dube

Freshman Composition

November 20, 2018

Piece by Piece

            In life we face many hardships, but as a family we face our problems together.  “You never know what someone is dealing with behind closed doors.  You only know what you see or what you think you see.”  People go through the most problems and people don’t know what they are going through because they keep it with each other and they deal with the problems together.  In a family people are verbally and physically abusive, people leave.  But people never know what they are going through.  The song Piece by Piece depicts the issues that Kelly Clarkson went through as a kid.  Kelly Clarkson had painted a certain image of men in her life and would not allow them in her life.  In order to understand the song, we have to hear every lyric carefully in order to understand the effect that what she is writing about has impacted her life.  Each song of Kelly Clarkson has such a deep meaning, when she sings her songs, she sings it with passion; we may not be able to hear her but the way her voice sounds really emphasizes the way she feels.  Kelly Clarkson wrote this song to tell the story of her father leaving and talks about the damage that was caused on her when her father left.  That part is about her past while during the song she ends up talking about her present and how her husband has been the glue that is piecing her back together.

The beginning of the song starts out slow and with a piano riff.  She starts out with a strong voice and her voice goes well with the beast of the piano and the notes that are being played.  The piano is being played on the bass side of a piano, we can tell that by the sound that each note gives when played.  Kelly Clarkson starts the song by saying how she remembers her father walking away from them.  She says “And all I remember is your back, walking towards the airport, leaving us all in your past”, the sound of her voice with these lyrics go well together, by hearing her sing you can hear that her father leaving was very hard on her and how the last memory that she has of her father was of him walking away from her and her mother.  Travelling far to see her father and asking him to come back and having him say that he doesn’t love you is the hardest thing that someone can go through.

During the song, in each part of the chorus she repeats “But piece by piece, he collected me up off the ground, where you abandoned things, yeah… Piece by piece, he filled the holes that you burned in me at six years old”. When she sings that part here the music I starting to get more upbeat and the feeling that she is starting to get stronger.  In the beginning of the chorus she mentions how he had helped put her pieces back together, in this part she is talking about her husband and how he helped her get through the problems that her father had put her through.  She began to let a man get back close to her again, she was beginning to fully trust them again after the bad experience that she had in the past with her father walking away.  The music starts to get more upbeat and you can hear her voice be more uplifting compared to when the song had first started her voice was sad and low and the music was also on the bass side of the piano, however now that she is older and has let someone get much closer to her the sound of the piano is moving towards the treble side of the piano because the sound is much higher.

During the sing she mentions how he “never walks away, he never asks for money, he takes care of me, ‘cause he loves me, piece by piece, he restored faith, that a man can be kind and a father could stay”. That means that her husband is what helps restore her faith of men and that not all men are like her father.  She talks about the things that he did for her like repair her way of seeing men and he helped her by showing her that not all men are alike, not all me leave.  At this part of the sing she talks about her father and all the things that he did to her and how her husband is the complete opposite of what he was like.  The song title goes well with this part of the sing because “piece by piece” is a metaphor that when her husband had met her she was in “pieces” but as time passed and they spent time together he was able to put all her pieces back together.  He helped her realize that she is worth something.

Towards the end of the song she starts to mention her daughter because she says “ I will never leave her like you left me, and she will never have to wonder her worth, because unlike you, I’m going to put her first”, she is starting to lean away from the history with her father and is using the experience from her father to show that she will never leave her daughter how her father did. She says this to show that she is nothing like her father, that she will never leave her daughter and that her daughter will always be above everyone else.  When people grow up with a horrible experience the only thing that they want is too not let their kid go through all the pain that they went through, so their top priority is to not let their kid deal with that. She also mentions that he will never walk away and that he will never break her heart, that he will always love her, and he’ll take care of things. She also mentions this to show that her husband will never leave his daughter the way that her father left her when she was little.  She says, “piece by piece, he restored my faith, that a man can be kind and a father should be great”.  Her voice for these last few words make her sound more like a relief that she will never have to go through the pain of someone leaving and that her daughter will never go through that type of pain ever in her life because no one will ever leave her.

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