How a 4:44AM Breakdown - Became Our Radio Hit Single

Sometimes the thing that breaks your heart becomes the thing that finds its way to the radio.

THREE days from now, I’ll sit down at PARLANCE, and I’m going to talk about parts of my life and career that I usually have the luxury of translating into poetry first. BUY TICKETS HERE

I’m scared.

Not scared to perform. I know how to perform.

I’m scared to answer.

Poetry gives me architecture. I decide where the doors are. I decide which windows you can see through. I decide where the poem ends.

An interview is different.

Somebody can simply ask:

“What happened?”

And once the answer is in the room, it’s in the room.

There’s no edit button.

No clever line break to hide behind.

No walking offstage before the audience gets to ask a follow-up question.

So, yes. 3 days.

Come see me be brave—or at least sit very still while attempting to look brave.

Tickets for PARLANCE are available through the link in my bio.

One of the stories I’ll be talking about begins with our radio single, “Never Again.”

Today, “Never Again” by Queen Sheba, Chanté Moore and Lil Ronnie is an R&B/spoken word poetry single playing on V-103, The People’s Station in Atlanta.

That sentence still feels strange to type.

I’m incredibly grateful to Joyce Littel for breaking the record—for being one of the first people to believe this unusual marriage of R&B and spoken word belonged on radio and helping get it out into the world.

Now we’re hoping other R&B and Urban AC radio stations around the country hear what she heard.

But there was no radio when “Never Again” began.

There were boxes.

4:44AM

I had just left an extremely late studio session.

I walked into my approximately 700-square-foot basement loft and saw boxes everywhere.

My boxes.

My things.

Five months after my relationship ended, my belongings had finally been returned to me.

I hadn’t been allowed to come pack them myself.

I don’t know whether you’ve ever seen a relationship reduced to inventory.

Clothes.

Objects.

Things that used to have a place in a house.

Things that used to belong to routines.

Things you forgot you owned.

Things you desperately needed five months ago.

Things that had absolutely no business being emotional until you saw them sitting inside cardboard.

And suddenly, there was my relationship.

Boxed.

I had been trying to move forward, and every time I thought I had gained a little ground, something else seemed to arrive and pull me backward.

That morning, it was an entire room full of reminders.

I broke.

And at 4:44AM, my phone rang.

It was Lil Ronnie.

Here’s the ridiculous part:

Lil Ronnie was calling to talk about album titles.

He had absolutely no idea he had just dialed into a Category Five emotional event.

I answered crying uncontrollably.

He asked:

“What? … What happened?!”

Lil Ronnie knew I had gone through a breakup because he had heard the poems.

He did not know all the details.

And I didn’t want to give him all the details.

I didn’t want to be the woman unloading her entire personal life onto her producer at five o’clock in the morning.

So I tried to explain the boxes.

The five months.

The fact that I had not been able to pack my own belongings.

The feeling of walking into that tiny loft and suddenly being surrounded by pieces of a life I was desperately trying to stop living.

And then Lil Ronnie did something I remember very clearly.

He got quiet.

He listened.

He didn’t insult me.

He didn’t minimize it.

He didn’t tell me what I should have done.

He didn’t tell me to “just move on.”

He didn’t give me a producer speech.

For roughly two minutes, he just let me be devastated.

Then Lil Ronnie became vulnerable himself.

He said:

“We’ve all been there. I’ve… been there.”

And then:

“Let’s just write about it. Let’s write about it.”

That was it.

No TED Talk.

Apparently my therapy session had a two-minute limit and studio time started again in twelve hours.

TWELVE HOURS LATER

Lil Ronnie called everybody back into the studio.

This had not been planned.

By then, he had written the foundation of what would become “Never Again.”

Then Chanté Moore heard it.

She took to the song immediately.

There are singers who can perform sadness.

Then there are singers whose voices sound like they remember something.

Chanté did that.

According to The Dispatch—which, as everyone knows, is an unimpeachable journalistic institution—Chanté sings:

“I’ll never, ever ‘fully’ fall in love again.”

And suddenly my private breakdown had a melody.

But now that I have some distance from it, I keep returning to one word.

Fully.

Not:

“I’ll never fall in love again.”

She sings:

“I’ll never, ever ‘fully’ fall in love again.”

There’s a caveat hiding in my heartbreak.

There’s a loophole in NEVER AGAIN.

There’s still hope.

Now, let’s be reasonable.

Hope does not mean recklessness.

Love might knock on my door again, but I reserve the right to answer with a side-eye, some nunchucks, a samurai sword and Charlie, my girl German Shepherd, standing beside me looking like she’s been briefed by Secret Service.

…LOL.

But the important thing is:

I’ll answer the door.

That realization changes the song for me.

Because maybe “Never Again” was never actually about giving up on love.

Maybe it was about grieving the version of me who once believed love meant you could sleep with both eyes closed.

Then I had to write my side.

I wrote:

“I used to think
love looked like
sleeping with both eyes closed.”

That line says more about where I was emotionally than almost anything else I could tell you.

The breakup had changed what safety meant to me.

I had always thought intimacy meant relaxing.

Passwords.

Toothbrushes.

Bathroom doors left cracked.

The tiny, ordinary evidence that says:

I trust you enough to stop watching the exits.

Then you learn that somebody can be close enough to kiss you and still be capable of hurting you.

And your body takes notes.

That became the poem inside “Never Again.”

Not simply:

I don’t want another relationship.

Something more frightening:

What if I can’t relax inside love anymore?

That is different.

You can survive the person and still have your nervous system looking over its shoulder.

You can know intellectually that somebody new hasn’t hurt you and still feel your body preparing evidence.

You can want love and be terrified of what your own heart will do if it recognizes it.

That’s the woman who walked into the booth.

And then Chanté sang.

And I spoke.

And Lil Ronnie produced.

And somehow this tiny private disaster became a record.

We toasted that week because we could feel something happening in the room.

We believed “Never Again” could become an anthem for heartbroken people.

Not because heartbreak is unusual.

Because it isn’t.

That’s the point.

Almost everybody has had a never again.

Never again will I trust somebody like that.

Never again will I ignore that sign.

Never again will I give that much.

Never again will I let somebody get that close.

Never.

Again.

And then, of course, humans being humans, six months later somebody walks past smelling good and suddenly the policy is under review.

That’s why the song works for me.

It’s tragic.

It’s dramatic.

It’s sincere.

It’s also incredibly human.

AND NOW IT’S ON THE RADIO.

This is the part that gets me.

Something that began with me crying among boxes before sunrise is now coming through speakers on V-103 in Atlanta.

One morning I was standing in that basement loft wondering how my life had gotten there.

Now somebody can be driving down I-85 and hear that pain coming through their radio.

Art is strange.

You take something that almost swallowed you.

You put language around it.

Somebody puts chords underneath it.

Somebody else lends it a voice.

An engineer captures it.

A radio programmer believes in it.

And eventually a stranger is sitting at a red light singing along to the worst night of your life.

That might be the strangest form of healing I’ve experienced.

But maybe healing isn’t getting all the way back to the person you were before somebody hurt you.

Maybe it’s realizing the person who survived still has enough softness left to leave the door unlocked.

Well.

Not unlocked.

Let’s not get carried away.

The door is locked.

Charlie is awake.

I know where the nunchucks are.

But there is still a door.

And behind it, somehow, there is still hope.

I’m grateful.

To Joyce Littel, thank you for breaking this record and helping us get it onto Atlanta radio.

To Lil Ronnie, thank you for calling at 4:44AM.

Thank you for listening.

Thank you for being vulnerable enough to say you had been there, too.

And thank you for understanding that sometimes the producer’s job isn’t to fix the artist.

Sometimes it’s simply:

“Let’s write about it.”

To Chanté Moore, thank you for hearing the emotion in this song and stepping into it immediately.

And to everybody listening:

Thank you for letting something so personal belong to you, too.

Queen Sheba × Chanté Moore × Lil Ronnie

A Toxic Love

Stream “Never Again.”

Request it at your local R&B or Urban AC radio station.

Share it with somebody who survived the relationship they once thought they couldn’t live without.

And if you’re looking for Queen Sheba, Chanté Moore, Lil Ronnie, A Toxic Love, spoken word poetry, R&B/spoken word fusion, new R&B music, live performances, concerts, festivals, interviews or booking information, come find us.

A Toxic Love will be submitted for GRAMMY® consideration in the Spoken Word Poetry category.

But we’re not asking you to jump ahead with us.

It isn’t October yet.

Before consideration.

Before campaigns.

Before ballots.

Before any of that—

we want you to know us.

Not just our résumés.

Not just the nominations, platinum records, stages or credits.

The people.

The artists.

The producer.

The engineers.

The crew.

The 4:44AM phone calls.

The boxes.

The ridiculous studio nights.

The things that hurt.

The things we laughed about anyway.

The moments none of us knew would become songs.

Because before we ask anyone to consider this album for anything, I want you to understand why it exists.

Know the stories.

Know the people.

Know what it cost us to tell them.

And know this:

After all of it, I apparently still believe in love.

Fully?

We’ll see.

…LOL.

#NeverAgain #AToxicLove #QueenSheba #ChanteMoore #LilRonnie #RnBMusic #RnBRadio #SpokenWordPoetry #Heartbreak #Healing #NewMusic #GRAMMYs