9) Last Christmas - Chorus

Last Christmas, I gave you my heart
But the very next day, you gave it away
This year, to save me from tears
I'll give it to someone special


Hello and welcome to Learning English with Lyrics, I am your host Jake, and I am very excited about our episode today. We are starting on a new song, which is always exciting, but I am especially excited about this one, and you'll see why in a moment. If you've never listened to this podcast before, I recommend going back and listening to the episode titled "Introduction" for a brief explanation of how this podcast works.

Before we get into our song, I want to pause for a moment to give a quick shoutout to one of the fans of the podcast. A "shoutout" is when you take a moment to mention somebody specifically. Today's shoutout is for a fan of the podcast named Nicky. Nicky wrote to us from Argentina to let us know that she was a big fan of the podcast. Thanks Nicky! We love getting feedback from listeners! I asked Nicky what her favorite English language song was, and she said it was the song "Perfect" by Ed Sheeran. Great choice Nicky! I'll include a link to it in the description. We actually have an Ed Sheeran song on our list of potential future songs! We hope we can break one down soon!

If YOU would like a shoutout on a future episode of the podcast, send us a message on instagram at the username lelpodcast or via email, [email protected]. Make sure that you mention your name, where you're from, and what your favorite English language song is. You can find our contact information in the description, or at the end of the podcast. Thanks again Nicky, we hope you enjoy today's episode!

Speaking of today's episode, we're going to do something a little special today, and over the next few weeks. It's December and in much of the English speaking world, December is a very special month. At the end of the month we celebrate what is without a doubt, the biggest holiday of the year, Christmas! And with Christmas comes lots and lots of Christmas music. It's insane how many Christmas songs we have! I will admit, I don't normally like Christmas music that much, but there are a few songs I do enjoy. The song we will be started today is a fun one, and better than that, it has SO many good words and phrases in it. I'm really excited to get started on it and I hope you are too.

The song is "Last Christmas" by the band Wham!. If you look them up, make sure you include an exclamation mark at the end of their name, it's part of it! Now, the version of this song that Wham! made was made in the 1980's. 80's pop music has a pretty distinct sound, and if you don't like it, you may not like this song. I don't want you to not listen to it, just because it was made in the 80's. Thankfully, this was and is a VERY popular song, and has been covered by a lot of different artists.

What does it mean that a song has been "covered" by an artist? To "cover" a song, means that one artist takes the song of another artist, and makes it again, but in their own style. Covers can be very, very different from the original. Sometimes a cover can become even more popular than the original song. Sometimes an artist will change the genre of music. Other times they might change the tone, changing a happy song to a sad one or vice versa. One of my favorite covers of all time is the song "Hurt", originally by Nine Inch Nails, but covered by Johnny Cash. Check it out! Maybe we'll even break it down on the podcast some day.

If the 80's version of "Last Christmas" doesn't interest you, you might be interested in a more modern cover of the song "Last Christmas", I'd recommend listening to Taylor Swift's cover of the song, she does a pretty good version of it. I'll include links to the original and Taylor Swift's version in the description.

Go ahead and give one (or both) of them a listen. I'll wait here.

How was it? Ready to get started? Let's begin.

You might have noticed that, unlike most songs, the song Last Christmas starts out with the chorus. This is unusual, but not impossible for a song to do, as you can see. So today, we are starting with the chorus.

The first line of the chorus says "Last Christmas, I gave you my heart."

Our chorus has several handy words to help us figure out what exactly the singer is talking about. The first one we see is "last". This tells us a time, specifically, which Christmas we're talking about. So which Christmas ARE we talking about? Well, we know it's not THIS Christmas. This Christmas would be right now, either the Christmas that's about to arrive or the one we are currently celebrating. Last Christmas means the Christmas we celebrated the year before. The Christmas that happened just before this Christmas, but not two Christmas's ago. The one that happened most recently, but is already finished.

This might seem simple, but be careful with this one! "THE last Christmas" is not the same thing as "last Christmas". "THE last" of something is the final one. The Last Christmas would be the final Christmas ever celebrated, with no more to follow. You might have heard the phrase "THE last days". This a reference to the end of the world or "the end times". "The last days" are the final days ever. Similarly, if you take "the last of" something, there are no more left. For example, if there is a box of cookies, and there is only 1 left, and I take it, I have taken "the last one". It can get a bit more complicated when we add more details, but the principal remains the same.

So last Christmas, was not THE last Christmas. It was last year. Easy enough. When we use the word "Christmas", we can either be talking about the time around "Christmas", usually the last few weeks of December, or we can be talking about the day specifically. A lot of times, we'll say "Christmas Day" to clarify that we mean the actual day, but it's okay if you don't. In this song, our singer seems to be talking about Christmas Day, even though he just uses the word "Christmas". We'll get more clues to that later on.

The second half of the line says "I gave you my heart".

This line is pretty simple. The singer is saying that they gave somebody their heart last Christmas. Obviously the singer does not mean that they literally gave their literal heart to somebody. It would be pretty hard for them to survive without their heart. Usually, the literal version of something like this is more common, but in this case, the figurative version of the phrase is way more common. To give somebody your heart means that you fell in love with somebody. That is to say, you are extremely romantically interested in them. So our singer is saying that last Christmas, they fell in love with somebody. That's very sweet. Well...until our next line.

The next line starts with the word "but". Uh oh. This isn't going to be good.

"But the very next day, you gave it away."

We already know what "the next day" is. The word "very" might seem odd here. This is being used as an intensifier. It is adding emphasis TO the word "next". When you say "the very next", you are emphasizing strongly that it was the one that directly followed. Our singer is emphasizing the cruelty or harshness of this other person's actions. These things weren't done a week or weeks later, but the DAY after he fell in love with this person.

So what did this other person do? The person our singer was in love with, "gave it away". What is "it" in this sentence? "It" is our singer's heart. To be honest, it doesn't really make a lot of sense to say that you gave away someone's heart. This isn't really an expression that we use. A better way to say it would be to say "I gave you my heart, and you gave it back.", but that doesn't rhyme, so we'll cut the writer of this song some slack.

The difference between "gave it away" and "gave it back" is that gave it "away" implies that you gave it to somebody else. Gave it back means you returned it, which in our song makes a lot more sense. Our singer fell in love with somebody and they rejected him the very next day. He gave them his heart, and they gave it back. Not a very nice Christmas.

The last two lines say "Next year, to save me from tears, I'll give it to someone special."

We're starting this line with another time frame. This mirrors or reflects our first line. "Last Christmas this happened. Next year this will happen." He's presenting us with a sequence of events. A cause and effect.

So let's make sure we have the timeline straight. Last Christmas, which was last year or one year ago, our singer had his heart broken by this person. THIS Christmas, which is the present, right now, is when he saw this person again. NEXT Christmas, that is to say, one year from now, he is going to do something different. And what is it that he's going to do differently?

Next year he's going to give it, his heart, to someone special. That is to say, he's going to give his LOVE to someone special.

The last two words here, "someone special" can be heard as a bit of a insult. By saying that the person he'll give his heart to next Christmas is "someone special", he's implying that the person he gave his heart to last Christmas is NOT someone special. Perhaps they aren't special because they were so mean to him last year.

You might have noticed that I skipped the middle part of the sentence. "Next year, to save me from tears, I'll give it to someone special. This phrase, "to save me from tears" is an addendum, or something extra added into the sentence. It gives us more detail about WHY he is going to give his heart to someone special next year. We could actually remove it entirely and still have a grammatically correct sentence. "Next year I'll give it to someone special."

But the writer has added it in, so what does it mean? Well, what do YOU think "to save me from tears" means?

Normally, to be saved from something means to be rescued from it. If you're caught in a trap, and somebody frees you from that trap, you have been "saved from" a trap. But the way our singer is using it is just a little bit different. If you listened to our last series on the song "Four, Five Seconds", you might remember the phrase "to keep me from". If you don't remember, check out episode 8, where we discussed the Bridge and Verse 3. The phrase "to be saved from" can mean the same thing as "to be kept from". Instead of being in a trap and being freed from it, you can be saved FROM stepping in a trap. This means you weren't freed from the trap, you were kept from ever being in the trap in the first place!

When our singer says "to save me from tears" he means to be "kept from tears". That is to say, kept from crying. He wants to be prevented from crying altogether. And what would cause him to cry? More heartbreak from this same person who hurt him last year. So he's decided that next year, he's going to make a change. He's not going to give his heart to the same person again.

Well, we are ending this episode on a bit of a sad note. But I hope that this episode has helped you and perhaps even saved you from some future frustrations in English! Join us next time as we look further into this 80's Christmas classic while discussing verse 1!