37) BREAK MY SOUL

Hello and welcome to Learning English with Lyrics, I am your host Jake, and today we are breaking down some lyrics from the song "BREAK MY SOUL" by Beyoncé. Let's jump right into it!

While there are many things we could talk about in this song, I want to focus on a line that I especially liked.

The line is "I'ma let down my hair 'cause I lost my mind"

Now the first thing we need to do of course, is to fix up some of the grammar. When speaking, and especially when singing, these are not considered mistakes, but as we are learning English, we do want to learn it properly, so let's just clean up the sentence a little bit.

'I'ma" is short for "I'm gonna" which is ALSO short for "I am going to". So we'll change the first phrase to "I am going to let down my hair." The second phrase is a bit simpler, we just need to change "'cause" to "because". So what we have is "I am going to let down my hair, because I lost my mind."

The first phrase, "I'm going to let down my hair" is an interesting English idiom. I'm going to describe it for you, and you see if you can figure out what it means. To "let something down" means to lower it. That is you take something that is high up, and bring it closer to the ground. In this line, we're talking about hair. Hair is always high up, on our heads, but when we talk about hair being "up" or "done up", we mean that it is styled in such a way that it is no longer hanging down. If you have long hair, and it is "down" that means it is hanging loose. It could be styled as well, but there is nothing keeping it "up". A hair style that is "up" can be used for many things: to look more professional, to look fancy, or simply to move your hair out of the way so that you can work!

In any of these cases, when you are finished with whatever it is...whether it's work, a fancy party, or a business meeting, you want to relax. So, you take out all of the pins and ties keeping your hair up, letting it fall down so that you can relax. That is "letting your hair down". It can literally mean to take your hair out of its style, OR it can figuratively mean to relax, as in the song.

The second part is a little bit simpler, and is a phrase you may have heard before. To "lose your mind" is another idiom. The idea here is that your mind, your brain, your sanity...is simply gone. You've lost it. You don't know where it is.

This could mean several things. It could mean that you are now crazy, or it could mean that you're angry. It could also just mean that you are very annoyed.

So we might imagine that our singer is perhaps very frustrated, and needs to relax. She lost her mind, so she is going to "let her hair down" and relax.

Well, that's all we have for this week! I hope you join us next time! I've been so grateful for all the listeners who have stuck with us. You guys are awesome. If you'd like to help out the podcast, tell just 1 friend about us this week. That would help us out in a huge way! Thank you all so much, and I'll talk to you soon.