Love me a good breakup song.
Of course country music is full of heartbreakers about relationships meeting their end, but country newcomer Kayley Bishop took her own divorce and put it into a song.
And while she may be relatively new to the country music scene in Nashville that’s often referred to as a “10-year town,” Kayley’s been through a lot that’s influenced the songs she’s released so far – specifically, the seven years of marriage that began when she was just 23 and ended in the seven minutes it took to sign the divorce papers back in 2020.
The result of that experience was Kayley’s latest single, “Seven,” which she says she decided to write as she was leaving the office where she signed the papers that ended her marriage:
“It took me seven minutes to sign my divorce papers, which dissolved seven years of marriage. As I left the office, got in my car and looked at the clock, I knew those seven minutes were going to be a song.”
The result was the (aptly-titled) “Seven,” which finds Kayley reflecting on the quick end to seven years of her life:
“Did you know
There’s seven days in a week
Seven hours is a good night of sleep
Seven’s supposed to be lucky, lucky me
Who’d ever thought our seven trips ‘round the sun
Would take us from saying I do, you’re the one
To I can’t and we’re done
It only took seven minutes
And seven years were finished”
If you’re not familiar with Kayley, she competed on season 15 of The Voice, where she landed on Team Blake and earned high praise from the judges and guest mentor Keith Urban. Since then, she’s been consistently pumping out new singles that infuse not only her own experiences but also her unwavering faith through it all.
I’ve said it so much that it’s almost cliché at this point, but the best thing about country music is the songwriting – and the best songwriting comes from experience. Whether that’s love, loss, heartbreak, authenticity always shines through in a well-written song.
And Kayley opened up and managed to write one heck of a heartbreaker through her own sadness.