Noa Bar Unpacks the Weight of a Broken Promise on “FOREVER, WHAT DID YOU MEAN?”

Los Angeles singer-songwriter and NPR Tiny Desk finalist Noa Bar enters deeply personal territory with “FOREVER, WHAT DID YOU MEAN?,” the second single from her forthcoming album, A Heartbreak Specialist.

The experimental pop release looks back at a relationship that reached the point where comfort had been replaced by uncertainty. At its center is a deceptively simple question: when someone promises to love you forever, and that love eventually changes, what did “forever” actually mean?

Noa Bar builds the song around that unresolved feeling rather than searching for an easy answer. Created alongside producer Jonathan, the track began with the two sitting together at piano and guitar, with an early demo ultimately becoming the finished song’s introduction.

There are more subtle details buried throughout the production. Behind Noa Bar’s voice and vocoder in the chorus is a recording of a woman at a gas station discussing how she has been trying to quit smoking for 15 years. For Noa Bar, the moment became a metaphor for one of the harder realities she encountered in her past relationship: saying you want to change and actually changing are two very different things.

We caught up with Noa Bar to talk about the relationship behind the single, the unusual production choices hidden within it, and what her next album is teaching her about love.

“Forever, What Did You Mean?” comes from someone promising you forever and that promise eventually changing. Has writing the song changed what the word “forever” means to you personally?

The word forever has never changed in my head. I still believe in the idea of forever and all it means. I think what has changed is how fast I tend to believe and trust someone, or the weight of the word love or forever to me. I take those words very seriously, and I am way more slow and careful when it comes to trusting someone with my heart. 

You’re revisiting relationships from the period when you were creating Danceable Problems. What can you recognize about those experiences now that you couldn’t see clearly while you were living through them?

I feel like I have learned more about myself than anything. I was not transparent enough with people who cared for me in order to paint a perfect picture of my relationship to them. I neglected myself with the excuse of "I do this for love." I fell in love too fast and too deeply. I have lost my balance somewhere in between. It's harder to understand you're in an unhealthy relationship when you're living the reality of it, and I have learned how important it is to take a step back, spend time with yourself, and see things from a different perspective.

The woman talking about trying to quit smoking for 15 years is such an unexpected layer in the chorus. When you heard that recording, what made you immediately connect it to the difference between someone saying they’ll change and actually changing?

My producer Jonathan and I knew we wanted a layer of noise under the vocoder, to make it more intense when silence hits and to give my listeners the experience of "what it felt like in my head" when I went through it. I kind of just record everything in my life just in case I find this recording inspiring later, like the car reverse camera or the jacket zipper, a glass of wine, a noisy club, the door at the gym. This voice memo just made so much sense because I am talking about how the man who said forever to me has changed, and now love means different things, and forever means different things, but he won't make the effort to make this a healthier relationship even though that's what he promised, like the lady who promised herself she'll quit smoking and she hasn't yet. It was the concept of words and actions to me.

You chose to keep the original demo as the song’s introduction rather than recreating it perfectly in the studio. What was captured in that first take that you knew you couldn’t manufacture again?

We have actually recorded his moment again in the studio. When we listened back to it, we realized there was something about the demo we couldn't recreate. The emotion was there, and the sync between Jonathan on the piano and me singing was perfect, with no metronome. We wanted to keep that honest moment rather than perfecting it. 

With A Heartbreak Specialist, how much are you interested in documenting heartbreak as it actually happened versus reinterpreting those experiences through the person you are now?

The album itself is telling the story of my love life while writing danceable problems in chronological order, so everything is very true to the moment, to the experience, but as every person, my perspectives and feelings have constantly changed while writing this album, maybe from the idea of writing and revisiting, being able to reflect on my feelings throughout the writing of this album.

I have kept things as honest and true to what they were in my heart, but as a writer and an artist, I also write more about my feelings and thoughts rather than the experience itself, just because that's what usually comes to me.