Matt Maltese has been making music that pulls at my heartstrings for a while now. He has a way of writing creating simple tracks that have trememndous effect on the listener. His songs are self-described “piano music” with emotion-filled vocals. One song that has stuck with me since I first heard it is titled “Even If It’s a Lie”. The song was released in 2015 and it isn’t his most listened to, but it holds a special place in my heart.

I first heard the song through dodie, another musician I really love and have written about before, who covered it in 2017. After falling in love with her cover, I listened to the original song and fell even more in love with it. The song shows a man’s love for his partner that he only showed after they had parted ways. He expresses his love for them and they don’t feel the same, and he wishes that they would say “I love you” one last time for him, even if it’s a lie.

Something I like about this song is that it doesn’t shy away from acknowleding the narrator’s mistakes. He says he “held you with a wandering eye”, meaning he didn’t pay his partner much attention when they were together, but now that he knows there’s more to her he feels “the love I shoulda shown”. He explains how he pulls his partner in, “but you push me out”, illustrating the one-sided relationship between them. The partner says they don’t love him, but he begs them to “say it one more time” so he can take that with him after they part ways.

In the second verse, Maltese lists little things he now notices and loves about his ex, like the “colors” in their dress and the way they put up their “golden hair”. Despite this, he will “turn the lights down and leave” because he knows he is too late. He wants to “live on as if you still love me”, hence the reason he begs them to say they love him one more time before they separate forever.

Maltese’s vocals hold so much emotion in them. That raw emotion coupled with well-placed reverb and harmonies, all wrapped up with a very organic sounding piano is what makes this song so heartbreaking. Everyone wants to be loved in one way or another and everyone has made a mistake at some point in their life, and those universal experiences are encompassed in this song. It makes it easy to relate to and to be broken by.