Aretha Franklin / Waiting To Exhale (Original Soundtrack Album) / 1995
It Hurts Like Hell (from Waiting to Exhale - Original Soundtrack)
weary, aching, tender but exhausted
Aretha Franklin sings a ballad about love curdling into pain without dying outright, where the couple still cares but has lost the trust needed to act on it. Written for the Waiting to Exhale soundtrack, it functions as a plainspoken meditation on emotional exhaustion rather than a story with a plot.
love and suffering intertwined emotional exhaustion fear of vulnerability the gap between feeling and trust longing for release from pain
Who's speaking
A first-person narrator addresses her partner and, by extension, herself, describing a shared relationship from the inside. She sounds emotionally reliable and self-aware, not bitter or vengeful -- she diagnoses the problem clearly even as she remains stuck in it.
What happens
The song opens with a general claim about what love is supposed to be, then pivots into the confession that love has instead become a source of constant, low-grade agony. It moves from abstract statements about pain to a direct address of a specific partner, naming the couple's shared problem of love without trust. By the end, the narrator proposes a way out -- letting go of accumulated hurt -- without confirming whether that release actually happens, leaving the song suspended between resignation and hope.
How it's built
The song is built on a repeating verse-and-refrain pattern rather than a conventional verse/chorus/bridge arc, with call-and-response backing vocals answering each line of the verses. The refrain functions as an anchor that recurs with slight variation, while the middle section shifts from generalized statements about love and pain into a more specific, second-person address to a partner, which serves as the song's emotional turn.
Section by section
Opening verse
“something wonderful to me”
The song begins with an almost naive definition of love, setting up an idealized standard the rest of the song will measure against and fall short of.
First refrain
The refrain shifts from description to declaration, naming the pain directly and establishing the recurring structure that will frame every verse that follows.
Second verse
The claim that true love cannot be hidden or set aside suggests the narrator's problem isn't waning feeling but the impossibility of escaping feeling that has become painful.
Third verse / bridge-like turn
“so full of love, so little trust”
This is the song's clearest diagnostic moment, isolating trust rather than love itself as the wound, and shifting the address from generalized pain to a specific relational dynamic between two people.
Final verse
The narrator proposes releasing accumulated hurt as the condition for happiness, but the song ends on the same refrain rather than resolution, implying the letting-go is aspirational rather than achieved.
Craft
- call and response
- Background vocals complete or comment on the lead line after each phrase, dramatizing an internal dialogue and reinforcing the sense that the pain being described is something both partners silently understand.
- paradox
- The song repeatedly yokes love to suffering and equates laughter with pain, insisting these opposites now coexist, which captures the disorienting experience of a relationship that has not ended but no longer feels good.
- anaphora
- The repeated 'sometimes it hurts' openings across verses create a incantatory rhythm, turning private pain into something ritualized and almost liturgical, as if naming it repeatedly is a way of coping with it.
- hyperbole
- The title phrase itself is an intensifier that pushes ordinary heartache into extremity, giving the song its emotional ceiling and its most quotable moment.
Reading it
The most persuasive reading treats this as a song about the specific agony of unresolved intimacy -- two people who still love each other but are paralyzed by accumulated hurt and an inability to be vulnerable again. An alternative reading, given its soundtrack placement, is that it voices a more generalized, almost archetypal female experience of loving under duress, functioning less as one couple's story and more as an anthem for the film's broader themes of women enduring difficult relationships.
Context
This track appears on the 1995 Waiting to Exhale soundtrack, an album built around songs voicing the emotional lives of Black women dealing with love, betrayal, and self-reliance, largely produced by Babyface. I don't have reliable specific details about the writing or recording session for this particular Franklin track beyond its soundtrack placement, so any claims about its production history should be treated as uncertain.
Listen for
- the call-and-response backing vocals that answer each line like an inner voice
- the way Franklin's phrasing lingers on 'hurts' each time it recurs, subtly varying the emotional weight
- the shift from generalized statements about love to the direct 'us' language in the middle section
- the lack of a clean resolution at the song's end despite the talk of letting go
- dynamic builds where the arrangement thickens under the refrain to underline its emotional peak
About Aretha Franklin
Aretha Louise Franklin was an American singer, songwriter and pianist. Regarded as the "Queen of Soul", she was twice named by Rolling Stone magazine as the greatest singer of all time.
1942 - 2018 / United States
Full biography and catalogue