Singled Out: Eddie Schwartz's We Win

11-21-2025

Hit songwriter and producer Eddie Schwartz (Pat Benatar's "Hit Me With Your Best Shot" among many others) just released his new EP "Film School", and to celebrate we asked him to tell us about the song "We Win". Here is the story:

"We Win" saved my life. I know that sounds a little over the top, but that's how I feel about that song. So here's the story. In 1997 I moved my wife and two young kids from Toronto Canada to Nashville, Tennessee, and promptly got into the Nashville songwriting two-step, which is writing two songs a day, five days a week. I'd do one writing session in the morning from 10am to 1, then an hour for lunch and then another writing session in the afternoon from 2 to 5. Writing with different people, artists, other songwriters - so I was writing something like 10 songs a week. Now before that, when I wrote songs I took my time. If I wasn't happy with a song I was working on and it took a week or a month or even years, that was the time I took. FYI, "Hit Me With Your Best Shot" literally took years to write. So the Nashville songwriting scene was very intense, and a world away from how I wrote before. Don't get me wrong, I met some amazing writers and artists, like Gary Levox of Rascal Flatts ( we wrote "See Me Through" with Bruce Miller), and it was an amazing experience. But after doing it for a number of years, I realized that I was burnt out and not writing the songs I wanted and needed to write.

So I quit, took a long break, and got very involved working on copyright and authors' rights issues, which are very challenging now, and have been for some time.

I did try to write and I had a lot of encouragement from my family and friends here in Nashville and elsewhere, but I just couldn't find my way back to how I wrote songs before my Nashville years. I spent a lot of time with a guitar in my hands staring at a blank page. I didn't give up. I'd walk away and come back a day later - or a week and had some ideas that I thought were worth pursuing. But the page stayed blank.

I felt if I was going to write songs again, I needed to have something meaningful to say, something hopeful at a time when for me, and maybe for a lot of other people, hope was in short supply.

I remember sitting holding my guitar in my small writing room - I sort of had some music I liked, but no ideas for lyrics. And then too very short words came to me - "we win". I started singing them to the chord changes I had and it was one of those moments you never forget. "If love counts for something, we win" It was a tremendous relief. It felt like I had found my way home, that I had an idea that was worth devoting time to and getting right, and maybe even worth sharing once it was ready.

It was the breakthrough I very much needed, and over the next few months I was able to finish "We Win" and the other songs on Film School.

Hearing is believing. Now that you know the story behind the song, listen and watch for yourself below and learn more here