The World Keeps Spinning

**A Heart in the Rearview: On Logan Brill’s “World Still Round” (2017)**

By Kroes den Bock

—

I have always found myself drawn to songs that leave room for the pain. Growing up in a midwestern town, I was raised on a steady diet of radio gold—blazing choruses and boot-scooting optimism, the sort of country music engineered to fill up a Friday night with hoots and hollers. But as the years wore on, as heartbreaks piled up and ambitions ebbed and flowed, I found that the songs I loved most were the quiet ones, the overlooked ones. The ones you might hear at midnight on some faraway FM station, crackling through static, keeping you company when all the world’s asleep.

Logan Brill’s *“World Still Round”*—the title track of her 2017 album—is just such a song. I doubt you’ve heard it spinning on mainstream radio. Brill is an artist who ought to have broken through in that mid-2010s country surge, but for whatever reason—label apathy, timing, market fads—her name didn’t reach the glitzy marquees or stadiums. Yet it’s exactly in those margins, out beyond the floodlights, that a song can become something intensely personal. “World Still Round” is, to me, a small miracle from a time when I needed miracles most.

The premise of the song is simple: the world doesn’t stop for heartbreak. It keeps on spinning, indifferent to personal loss. The first verse begins gently, with Logan’s dusky alto and a ripple of steel guitar:

*“People in the coffee shop staring at their phones
They don’t know my life, they don’t know you’re gone
Sunlight on old sidewalks, still shining down
Everything keeps moving, the world’s still round.”*

When I first heard those lines, I was three months into the black hole of a breakup that had left me hollow and angry at how mundane the days remained. How could my world fall apart while the town’s routine persisted? Brill’s voice—weary but sure—felt like someone in the passenger seat, quietly validating the ache. There’s a wisdom in her restraint: she doesn’t wallow, but names the pain in plain terms, then lets it breathe.

The chorus is an anthem for the brokenhearted everywhere:

*“‘Cause the world keeps turning over
Even when your heart breaks down
It goes on, just like always
Though you’re barely making a sound
You could curse the stars or drink the night away
But the sun’s gonna come up anyway
So pick your pieces up off the ground
The world’s still round.”*

I used to think my problems were extraordinary, deserving of a pause in the cosmos. I’d gossip to friends about how unfair it was that the barista smiled, or that the bus ran on time, while my inner universe crumbled. But Brill’s chorus hit me with the simple, humbling realization that pain is both intimate and universal—a badge of being alive, not a flaw in the design.

The song never explodes into melodrama. Instead, the arrangement is understated: brushed percussion, resigned acoustic picking, steel guitar lingering behind her voice. It’s the sound of dawn after an all-night storm, the world cleaner but quieter. The production, courtesy of Matthew Miller, gives the song breathing room, letting Brill’s earthy delivery carry the emotional freight.

Somewhere in the second verse, Brill sings:

*“I wrote your name in the window steam,
Watched it fade out with the dawn
Every goodbye is a waking dream
But the morning always moves on.”*

That little phrase—“wrote your name in the window steam”—still takes me back to nights spent staring at fogged-up glass, counting breaths, running my finger along old memories before the sun inevitably made them illegible. I suspect most of us, in lonely hours, have written names that morning erases. There is something forgiving in the song’s acceptance of these mini-rituals, the harmless futility of remembering.

What makes “World Still Round” special isn’t just its empathy for heartbreak, but its encouragement to move forward. Unlike so many songs that dwell in the whiskey-soaked aftermath, Brill is practical. She’s not telling you to ‘get over it’ or to ‘move on’ like some tough-love aunt at Thanksgiving, but rather to witness yourself, to sit in the mess for a minute, and then to “pick your pieces up off the ground.”

I have a tendency toward rumination. It’s both a curse and a secret superpower—I’ve built my life as a writer out of relentless self-examination, but it also leaves me stuck in loops, second-guessing decisions I made half a decade ago. If psychology is central to anything, it’s the uneasy relationship between memory and progress, that compulsion to relive an old pain until it becomes familiar, even comforting. For a long time, I was master of that particular self-sabotage: isolating myself with guilt, drawing the curtains, refusing invitations, listening to the same heartbroken ballads on repeat as if I could outlast the ache. “World Still Round” didn’t cure me. It did something more rare—it made my sorrow part of the landscape, something neither to be cherished nor despised. It just was.

There’s a bridge in the song that cracks the door open to hope, and it never fails to send a shiver up my spine:

*“Maybe tomorrow’s not so far away
And maybe you’re stronger than you were yesterday
You’re still here, with dust on your shoes
A little lost, but what else is new?”*

It’s that last line—a little lost, but what else is new?—that sticks. Every one of us walks around carrying secret histories. Every one of us, at some point, feels unmoored. The maturity of Brill’s writing is that she doesn’t offer the empty promise that everything will work out exactly as we wish. She just reminds us that being a little lost is the universal condition, and that it’s survivable.

I don’t know that Logan Brill intended “World Still Round” as a comfort to chronically anxious insomniacs, or to those whose hearts operate on an inconvenient delay. I do know that the song welcomed me back to myself, as if to say: “Yes, it hurts. But it’s OK that the world keeps spinning. In spite of what you fear, you’re still part of that motion.” That message, delivered with such lyrical clarity and melodic restraint, is rare in country music, especially among songs that slip between the cracks of the zeitgeist.

Perhaps you’ll listen to “World Still Round” and find your own heartbreaks mirrored back. Perhaps you’ll just find it pretty. For me, it arrived in a season of sadness and left the door open for whatever was next. It told me—and tells me still—the truest thing I’ve learned from music: this world never stops. That doesn’t mean we have to, too. Sometimes, it just means we start with the pieces, and remember that spinning is not the same as standing still.

*—Kroes den Bock*