Song Premiere: “The Other Side of Pain” by Larry Campbell and Teresa Williams

The anguish of pain lies within the sweetness of love like a fisted glove in a rose. The agony of love gone wrong twists our hearts and churns our souls even more when our lovers betray us. How do we travel the corridors of defeat, disappointment, anger and survive? How do we make it to the other side of our pain?

Larry Campbell and Teresa Williams deliver a heart-rending meditation on these questions on the lead track from their forthcoming new album, Contraband Love. “The Other Side of Pain” opens with Campbell’s bright guitar work that promises momentarily a jaunty walk, but those early riffs move rapidly into a series of minor chords that create a dark tone that belies the brightness of the opening measures. And that’s the genius of the song: love is bright and sunny, until clouds of betrayal swirl. The singer lives with her pain, even as she watches the lover who’s betrayed her live his life in sweetness and light. Despite her pain, she relishes hope: “I hope someday/I can wish you well/’Cause if that snowball/Ever makes it through hell/I’ll be looking from the other side/At the sunshine/From the other side of pain.”

Campbell talks about how he came to write the song: “I got to thinking about betrayal. There’s the person who gets betrayed and the person who does the betraying. Everybody’s felt the pain of betrayal. The person being betrayed is in a dark, shadow world while the betrayer is in the world of sunshine and happiness. That’s an interesting irony to me, and the chorus captures that irony, I hope.”