Have you ever related a deck of cards to a relationship? In country singer/songwriter Jesse Labelle’s latest single, “Two Hearts and a Diamond,” he finds a connection between the two.
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The idea for this song came to Labelle while he was attending a wedding in Canada, when he heard the preacher mention that marriage is a lot like a deck of cards. The line that stuck out to him the most was when the preacher told the couple, “if you play your hand right, you end up with two hearts and a diamond.”
Without a second thought, Labelle wrote down this line to take back to Nashville because he knew he had to turn this advice into a song. After pitching the idea around town, he ended up writing it with Ava Suppelsa and co-producing it with Sam Ellis.
On their first try, they wrote a version of the song that didn’t feel like it was where it needed to be. Labelle explains that they “wrote it all about the wrong things. It was a song about going to a bar and meeting an old man at a keno machine who gives you advice about life … the whole vibe was off.”
The rewrite took them in more of a romantic direction after Labelle took a step back to remember where the idea for the song came from in the first place.
In order to restore the original vision, he said to Suppelsa, “This was inspired by a wedding, so you have to be able to dance to this at a wedding.”
Labelle realized that when a song like this is played for the first dance at a wedding, it will forever be an important part of that couple’s lives.
“A wedding song to me is super important because it actually weaves itself into two other people’s lives and all of a sudden it takes on a life of its own, far beyond what you wrote.”
When Labelle decided to move to Nashville, he knew he wanted to write a specific type of song, and this was the first one he wrote that he felt checked all the boxes.
“It’s my favorite song I’ve written. Ever since I’ve written it, I’ve always compared songs to it. Lyrically and melodically, it does everything that I want a song to do,” says Labelle. “From the day that we finished it, we knew it was something special.”
Fans can catch Jesse live at the Listening Room in Nashville, Tennessee on Friday, January 15th at 6pm. “Jesse Labelle & Friends” will feature Jesse’s band members and hit songwriters from Nashville’s songwriting community. You can purchase tickets here.
Photo Courtesy of Jesse Labelle
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