The 2010s File Feature
Try
Chart History and Recording Background of Try "Try" was released in September 2012 as the second single from P!nk's sixth studio album The Truth About Love, …
01 The Story
Chart History and Recording Background of Try
"Try" was released in September 2012 as the second single from P!nk's sixth studio album The Truth About Love, distributed through RCA Records. The album, released in September 2012, became one of P!nk's most commercially successful releases, debuting at number one on the Billboard 200 and generating multiple chart-performing singles. "Try" was positioned as the album's more introspective, emotionally substantive offering, balancing the buoyant lead single "Blow Me (One Last Kiss)" with a track that addressed the difficulty and pain inherent in genuine emotional commitment.
The song was written by Busbee, the American songwriter and producer born Michael James Ryan, who specialized in crafting emotionally resonant, rock-adjacent pop material for major artists. Busbee produced the track as well, building it around a piano-driven arrangement that gradually incorporated electric guitar and building percussion to create an emotionally escalating structure. The production was restrained by the standards of mainstream pop radio in 2012, emphasizing dynamics and emotional texture over the heavily processed, EDM-influenced sound that dominated much of that year's chart landscape. This relative austerity was a deliberate choice designed to foreground P!nk's vocal performance as the song's primary expressive instrument.
P!nk recorded the track during sessions for The Truth About Love at studios in Los Angeles. The album was a creative project that P!nk approached with considerable personal investment, addressing themes drawn from her own experiences of marriage, conflict, love, and resilience. Her personal life at the time, including her marriage to motocross racer Carey Hart and the birth of their daughter, provided emotional context that informed the album's recurring preoccupation with the complexities of long-term romantic commitment. "Try" was specifically aligned with this thematic territory, exploring the emotional cost and the ultimate value of persisting through difficulty in a relationship.
The song debuted on the Billboard Hot 100 on October 6, 2012, at position 56. Its initial chart trajectory was not immediately upward: the track exited the chart before re-entering at position 93 on November 17, 2012, then climbed steadily through December and into early 2013. By December 8, 2012, it had reached position 18, and it continued its ascent in the new year, ultimately achieving its peak position of number 9 during the chart week of February 16, 2013. The song spent 24 weeks on the Hot 100, a reflection of the extended promotional cycle and sustained radio momentum that P!nk's established commercial standing made possible.
Adult contemporary and adult pop radio formats were particularly receptive to "Try," with the song spending multiple weeks at or near the top of the Adult Pop Songs chart. P!nk's core audience in the United States and internationally skewed toward adult listeners who responded strongly to her combination of powerful vocals, rock-influenced production, and emotionally honest lyrical content. The song's slower build on the Hot 100 reflected the nature of radio-driven chart performance, where adult contemporary airplay built over weeks and months rather than generating immediate high-impact debut numbers.
The music video for "Try" was a substantial creative achievement that received significant attention and praise. Directed by Floria Sigismondi, it featured P!nk and dancer Colt Prattes performing an intensely physical contemporary dance routine that depicted an emotionally volatile relationship through movement. The video's raw physicality and emotional candor were immediately noted by critics and audiences alike, and it became one of the more discussed music videos of 2012 in terms of its artistic ambition and execution. Prattes would later star as Patrick Swayze's character in the stage adaptation of Dirty Dancing, a career trajectory that the "Try" video contributed to establishing.
Internationally, "Try" performed strongly in several major markets. It reached the top ten in Australia, New Zealand, and across multiple European markets, reflecting P!nk's exceptional international commercial standing, which had historically been even stronger in some overseas markets than in the United States. The song's emotional directness and powerful vocal performance translated effectively across cultural boundaries, and its relatively stripped-back production gave it a universality that maximized its international appeal.
The song received multiple award nominations and was widely cited in year-end critical lists as one of the stronger recordings from 2012's mainstream pop landscape. It stood as a significant entry in P!nk's catalog, demonstrating her continued ability to produce commercially successful material that also carried genuine emotional weight and artistic ambition.
02 Song Meaning
Themes and Meaning of Try
"Try" engages directly with one of the fundamental paradoxes of emotional courage: that the possibility of failure and pain is not a reason to avoid commitment, but rather an intrinsic feature of genuine love and connection. The song argues, through both its lyrical content and its emotional delivery, that the willingness to persist through difficulty and to remain vulnerable in the face of potential hurt is not foolishness but a form of necessary courage. This position gives the song a distinctive moral seriousness unusual in mainstream pop.
The central argument of the song is addressed to someone who has been hurt and is consequently reluctant to continue engaging emotionally. The narrator acknowledges the reality of pain and the legitimacy of the fear of being hurt again, but counters with the assertion that a life lived in self-protective withdrawal carries its own costs, and that the only alternative to the risk of pain is a form of emotional deprivation that is ultimately worse. This is not a simple or sentimental position: the song takes the weight of its subject seriously and offers not comfort but honest encouragement.
The music video's intensely physical choreography, depicting a couple in a relationship marked by both conflict and profound physical and emotional connection, visualized the song's central tension with considerable expressive power. The choice to render the emotional content of the song through contemporary dance rather than through conventional narrative imagery placed the physical embodiment of emotional experience at the center of the song's visual presentation. This formal choice reinforced the lyrical content's insistence on the body as a site of both vulnerability and resilient engagement.
P!nk's vocal performance is central to the song's meaning. Her voice carries qualities of hard-won experience and emotional authenticity that give the song's message credibility beyond its lyrical content alone. Her delivery communicates not detached advice but firsthand knowledge, suggesting that the narrator has herself navigated the emotional territory the song describes and is speaking from genuine personal experience rather than abstract principle. This quality of embodied authenticity is one of P!nk's most consistently recognized artistic assets.
The song's reception among adult listeners was particularly strong, with many citing its emotional honesty as one of its defining qualities. In an era of mainstream pop dominated by relatively uncomplicated celebrations of romantic attraction and social pleasure, "Try" occupied a distinct space as a song willing to engage seriously with the costs and difficulties of sustained emotional commitment. This willingness distinguished it from much of its commercial context and contributed to the depth and duration of its audience connection.
Critically, "Try" was recognized as one of P!nk's stronger compositions, praised for its restraint as well as its emotional impact. Its placement within The Truth About Love gave it a thematic context that enhanced its meaning: surrounded by songs exploring the complexities of a long-term relationship from multiple angles, "Try" functioned as a kind of thesis statement for the album's broader argument about love as an ongoing act of choice rather than a stable condition to be enjoyed passively.
The song has retained its cultural resonance in the years since its release, regularly appearing in compilations and retrospectives focused on the emotionally substantive side of early 2010s mainstream pop. Its combination of formal accessibility, powerful vocal performance, and genuine lyrical substance placed it in a category of popular song that transcends the purely commercial and achieves something closer to lasting emotional relevance.
→ More from the 2010s File
View all 2010s hits →
Keep digging