Try Sleeping With a Broken Heart

JACEON

I was almost done laying the beat on this track but I wanted my sis Asia to hear it out first before I made any more changes. The verse I wrote for her was dope if I do say so myself, and I couldn’t wait for her to hear it. As I leaned my chair back, I couldn’t help but think about the recent trip I made to visit my moms back in Brooklyn.

My mother was doing some spring cleaning when I arrived at her townhouse. There were boxes everywhere, but one particular one caught my eye. In it, contained old photo albums from my childhood. Taking a break from her cleaning, she took the books from my hand and led me to the couch where we spent the rest of the afternoon pouring over its contents.

Though I thought of Elle often, looking at these pictures of us had me thinkin bout wanting her back. Of all the woman I've been with these last ten years, none of them compared to her. She was one of my best friends growing up, and at times it made my move to Cali hard. I know it's corny but she was literally the one that got away and I just wanted her to know that.

"Wake up nigga!" Asia shouted as she burst through the door to the studio an hour later.

I wiped my eyes, "I wasn’t sleeping nigga..."

Asia plopped down on the sat beside him, "yeah whatever... why you so tired?"

"I was up all night tryna finish this track." It didn’t actually take me long to write the song, I was inspired after listening to the radio and the words just flowed out. Most of my night was spent on the phone with Alicia Keys and her team since my joint was basically the guys version to her song ‘Try Sleeping with a Broken Heart’, I needed her permission to sample it.

"Ooou, lemme see..."

I handed Asia what I wrote before turning on the beat, watching her face as she read over the lyrics. I had no problem admitting Asia was bad, I’d even told her to stop dressing like a damn dike cause she was too pretty for the s**t. She toned it down a little but once she opened her mouth, she talked like she was one of my niggas. Perhaps it was why I only ever thought of her as a sister.

When I first met her six years ago, she was a struggling artist rooming in a one-bedroom with a stranger in Los Angeles. After hearing her voice, I couldn’t see why she wasn’t a star already but then she spit some real s**t to me talking bout how she knew the value of her talent and wasn’t gonna let some big company screw her out of her hard-earned money. A year after that, I parted ways with my label and started my own with Asia by my side. Though she been stalling her album the last few years, she wrote some f*****g bangers for the new talent we had signed on. And now that there was no middle man, I was getting twice as much bread as before.

“This is dope bro,” she said as she looked up from the notepad I had written the lyrics on. “Let’s do this...”