Mary Wells / Looking Back 1961-1964 / 1993
My Heart Is Like a Clock
anxious, pleading, tinged with desperation under a bright surface
A brief, tightly wound early-Motown number that turns heartbreak into clock mechanics: the singer's heart has stopped like a dropped timepiece, and only a lover's kiss can wind it back to life. It's built almost entirely around a single conceit, repeated until the song fades rather than resolves.
heartbreak as mechanical failure time and decay dependency on a lover unresolved longing
Who's speaking
A first-person narrator addresses an absent former lover directly, asking them to return and restore her. The voice is emotionally exposed and not especially reflective -- she states her condition and makes a request, without examining the relationship's history or her own role in it.
What happens
The song opens at the moment of rupture, when the heart stops like a broken clock. From there time itself becomes strange and dilated, each moment stretching painfully. The narrator then names the only fix available to her: a kiss that would 'wind' her heart back into motion. The song doesn't move toward resolution -- it circles the same plea through a repeated verse and fades out, suggesting the clock never actually restarts.
How it's built
The song is compact, built on one verse that sets up the broken-clock image and a chorus-like section that supplies the 'wind it up' request. The verse is repeated rather than developed, and the piece ends on a fade rather than a bridge or climax, which reinforces the sense of stasis -- nothing changes, the heart just keeps asking to be wound.
Section by section
Opening verse
“just like a clock that has been dropped”
The song begins at the point of break rather than building to it, immediately establishing the clock image as the controlling metaphor. The violence implied by a dropped, stopped clock gives the emotional rupture a sudden, physical quality rather than a slow fade.
Time distortion lines
The narrator describes subjective time stretching unbearably, moments becoming hours and hours becoming days. This is a familiar grief trope, but here it's tied specifically to the mechanical metaphor -- her internal clock isn't just broken, it's measuring time wrong, which keeps the song's central image consistent.
Winding refrain
“only your kiss can wind it up”
This is the emotional center of the song: the solution to her broken state is placed entirely outside herself, in the returning lover's kiss. The request is almost mechanical in its specificity, which makes the vulnerability feel more stark -- she isn't asking for reconciliation in the abstract, she's asking for a literal action to restart her.
Closing repetition and fade
Rather than resolving, the song loops its central plea and dissolves into a fade-out. This structural choice enacts the song's own content: the clock never gets wound, the narrator is left mid-request, and the listener is denied the satisfaction of an answer.
Craft
- extended metaphor
- The heart-as-clock conceit runs through nearly every line: stopping, running down, winding up, hours and moments dragging. It's the song's entire engine, translating emotional pain into a mechanical, almost domestic image.
- simile
- Direct comparisons -- love running out like sand, hours stretching like days -- reinforce the clock metaphor by giving it concrete, sensory analogues for time's distortion under grief.
- repetition
- The verse and the winding plea repeat nearly verbatim, mimicking the ticking, circular motion of a clock and underscoring the narrator's stuck emotional state.
Reading it
The most straightforward reading treats the clock metaphor as a vehicle for conventional heartbreak -- stopped time standing in for emotional paralysis, the kiss as a stand-in for reconciliation and renewed vitality. A secondary reading might notice the passivity built into the metaphor: a clock cannot wind itself, and the narrator positions her own recovery as entirely dependent on an external agent's action, which could be read either as touching devotion or as a troubling abdication of agency. The song doesn't editorialize on which reading is correct, which is part of its genre's charm and limitation -- it's a tight pop conceit, not a psychological study.
Context
This track appears on the 1993 compilation 'Looking Back 1961-1964,' gathering early Mary Wells material from her formative Motown years, when she was among the label's first stars before Smokey Robinson-penned hits like 'My Guy' made her a crossover success. I don't have reliable specifics on this particular song's original release date, writer, or recording details, so I'm treating it primarily as a text rather than asserting production history.
Listen for
- How the arrangement likely underscores the clock conceit rhythmically -- listen for ticking or metronomic elements in the instrumentation
- The repeated verse structure and how it mirrors the song's stuck, circular emotional state
- The fade-out ending, which leaves the central request unanswered rather than resolving it
- Wells's vocal delivery on the winding plea, and whether it reads as yearning, anxious, or controlled
About Mary Wells
Mary Esther Wells was an American singer who helped to define the emerging sound of Motown in the early 1960s.
1943 - 1992 / United States
Full biography and catalogue