“I want what I can’t have/ Still holdin’ onto hope / Downing in my tears / this love’s a sinking boat,’ Meghan Trainor sorrowfully sings at the start of “Wave,” the new single she released on Sept. 26. The song, with singer Mike Sabath playing the Jack to Meghan’s Rose, depicts a tumultuous relationship that has Meghan caught up in an undertow. “Once my hands have reached the shore / You pull me back in / And I shouldn’t beg for more / but I don’t want it to end,” she sings. Once she sings the hook — “Just take me like a wave” — the song transforms from a somber ballad to a dance track, with a booming bassline and synth-pop beat.
Mike pops up from under the surface to sing his siren’s song to Meghan. “Headed to surface, I’ll keep you afloat / I’ll keep you safe, babe (Yep, yep) / Right in the middle of Heaven and Hell / This world was made for us (Yeah),” he sings, adding that he “won’t do the shit that I did before.” The song ends with Meghan’s seemingly surrendering to those crashing waves of passion, repeating the chorus that has her begging her lover to “just take me like a wave.”
The dichotomy between the song’s mournful start and its almost rapturous end paints an interesting picture of what is ultimately a doomed romance. One would hope she finds her way back to dry land someday, before the waves take her under for the third and final time.
“Waves” is the latest single from Treat Myself, her third major-label studio release. Treat Myself was initially scheduled for an August 2018 release, but Meghan decided to delay it because she wanted to add some more tracks to the project. I wrote a lot of songs for my third album and I almost wrote too many,” she told us. “And I wrote a lot of love songs!” she said EXCLUSIVELY to HollywoodLife in February. “And I was like ‘there is too many love songs on this album. My Dad was like ‘clean it up.’ I had to clean it up. So I took those extra special love songs, and my manager was like, ‘Let’s try to run Valentine’s Day!’ And I was like, ‘All right, I have never seen that done before… So let’s do it!’ “
“So we tried six love songs, and they are all very personal, they mean the world to me,” she added. The result of this “clean up” was her EP The Love Train. The release contained one song that was near and dear to Meghan’s heart, as she had it play right before she tied the knot with Daryl Sabara. “One song, ‘Marry Me’ I walked down the aisle to. So it is literally my love story told in six songs.”