


Even when she’s singing about sadness, though, she’s echoing strength, as the lyrics for “Long Way To Happy” have Pink as hopeful as she is on “Wild Hearts.” That kind of pain-fueled, feminist performance is just as much P!nk as is the playfulness we see in videos for “Get This Party Started” or “So What?” or in many other fun moments in On the Record. The song is Pink’s “Me Too” and, like many of us, she can say (or sing) that more than once. It’s a defiance that says the Harvey Weinsteins of the world will not continue to keep women under their thumbs as silent, complacent, good girls who are expected to swallow traumatic recollections and their reverberations in order to keep the power structures balancing the patriarchy from falling in on itself. More than 10 years after “Long Way To Happy,” “Wild Hearts Can’t Be Broken” is an updated reminder to P!nk and the women of the world that, like the bittersweet sentiment of “Beautiful Trauma” itself, there’s a unifying strength underlying the darkness - that a century after the Suffragettes started their first formations of feminism and demands of equality, resistance and persistence is not only necessary, but ingrained within us as women.

“Long Way to Happy” co-writer Butch Walker told PopMatters of the song: “Well, obviously when we go into the studio it’s going to be pretty emotional time, so let’s make sure the vocal goes down naturally and, sure enough, she was practically in tears when she sang it. And that’s that song,” she told The Independent the year I’m Not Dead was released. “I know a lot of people that have been abused and/or molested and/or fucked over by someone close to them. It’s worth noting that in 2006, her album I’m Not Dead included the song “Long Way to Happy,” which P!nk said was based on a poem she’d written about surviving sexual abuse by a cop when she was a teen. She publicly acknowledges and supports other female artists, including those that she’s had less-than-friendly relationships with in the past (she now say she doesn’t hold grudges) and those the press attempts to pit against her or vice versa. “I will have to die for this I fear/ There’s rage and terror and there’s sickness here,” P!nk starts on “Wild Hearts Can’t Be Broken.” “I fight because I have to/ I fight for us to know the truth/ There’s not enough rope to tie me down/ There’s not enough tape to shut this mouth/ The stones you throw can make me bleed/ But I won’t stop until we’re free.”Ī self-professed feminist (in interviews, not the doc itself), Pink is not just proud to be a woman, but frequently speaks and sings about the current landscape of how men and women to relate, as well as how women relate to one another.
