Sometimes a great song is simply a great idea. It's not that the music and words are incidental; it's just that the idea is so good that it carries the song.
I think this is the case for "She Used to Be Mine" from Waitress by Sara Bareilles.
This is a song of loss and regret. In the olden days, it would have made a great saloon song with the likes of Sinatra propping up a bar and running his finger around the rim of an empty whisky glass. Instead of lamenting a lost love, however, Sara Bareilles' song laments a lost self.
And that is a great idea.
In the context of the musical, it is sung by a woman at a low point in her life. She's been abused and she is pregnant with an unwanted baby. But it's not self-pitying. We know this because the portrait that she paints of her former self is a realistic one:
"She's imperfect but she tries
She is good but she lies"
That's some honest self-criticism.
Then there's a series of everyday phrases that are given just enough of a twist to make them come up fresh and appealing:
"She is all of this mixed up and baked in a beautiful pie"
"Sometimes life just slips in through the back door"
"For a chance to start over and rewrite an ending or two"
That is simply beautiful lyric writing.
But, in the end, it is the central idea what really makes the song.
If I may digress.
The English playwright JB Priestly wrote a play called Time and the Conways. The play tells the story of a family with a snapshot of their life just before the First World War and then another snapshot, twenty years later, on the eve of the Second World War. It is a play about the idea of time. At one point, one of the characters says this:
"Now, at this moment, or any moment, we're only cross-sections of our real selves. What we really are is the whole stretch of ourselves, all our time, and when we come to the end of this life, all those selves, all our time, will be us - the real you, the real me."
End of digress.
"She Used to be Mine" is, I think, saying something similar. In this song, we're getting one "cross-section" of a self looking back at another "cross-section" of the same self. And seeing someone very different. By looking at herself across time, she is getting closer to the "whole stretch" of herself, closer to her real self.
That is a simple, yet profound thought and simple-yet-profound is something that musical theatre songs can, at times, do really well.
All mixed up and baked in a beautiful pie.
