Whoever had the car before me left it on some hip-hop/R&B station. I don't remember much about the song, but suffice it to say that it featured an Usher clone going on and on about how he wanted some girl back who he had screwed around on. The song was so syrupy, sophomoric, and overproduced as to be laughable, and it reminded me of this:
NSFW due to David Cross ass at the end, among other things
I giggled all the way up La Cienega to 3rd Street, at which point Kanye came on and I shut the radio off. But that song -- along with my earlier post about the five albums that changed my life and my newly rekindled obsession with Jim Croce -- got me thinking about hearbreak songs, and how hard they are to do well. No genre of popular music is more susceptible to cliché and unintentional hilarity.
Occasionally, however, a musician manages to find that nerve and work it like a boxer working a kidney. You try to resist, but by the end you're reduced to a blubbering mess.
So here, in no particular order, is my list of the heartbreak songs that actually kinda work:
Jim Croce - "Operator (That's Not The Way It Feels)"
I already talked at length about Croce in my last post, so I'll try to keep this short. What makes this song so effective is the specificity of the story. It's just a guy talking to a telephone operator and wanting to place a call to his ex-girlfriend. We don't know anything about their relationship, other than that she ran off with his "best old ex-friend Ray." We don't know what happened or who was at fault, so we're able to imprint our own experiences onto the back story. Meanwhile, we're just left with this guy, standing in a phone booth and trying to talk himself into making a call that, deep down, he knows he doesn't want to make. He wants to wish her well, let bygones be bygones, but he just can't do it.
"Operator, can you help me place this call? Because I can't read the number that you just gave me," he says. "There's something in my eyes, you know it happens every time."
We've all been there, in some fashion, I would guess.
In the end, he tells the operator to forget it. "You can keep the dime," he says. No lyric has ever summed up the resigned defeat that follows a nasty breakup better than that.
Johnny Cash - "If You Could Read My Mind"
Sometimes it's really not the song itself, but rather the person singing it and what their own story brings.
Just before he died, Johnny Cash recorded this cover of Gordon Lightfoot's...uh...classic from the early 1970s. The lyrics are interesting, but are the sort of abstract singer-songwriter stuff you found a lot of in that time.
But if you listen to this and remind yourself that Cash was nearly blind and bedridden when he recorded it, a broken man who was still mourning the death of his wife of 35 years, June Carter Cash...well, worlds open up.
The delicate guitar, the plaintive strain of his haggard, old man voice ... Don't tell me that when he sings "But stories always end/And if you read between the lines/You'll know that I'm just trying to undersand" he's not thinking about June and his own imminent death.
The Ramones - "The KKK Took My Baby Away"
And now for a change of pace.
This is another one where the song itself is really secondary to the back story. Anyone who knows anything about the Ramones knows that uber-leftie Joey and super-rightie Johnny really, really, REALLY hated each other. They hated each other pretty much from the start, but things only got worse after Johnny stole Joey's girlfriend. So Joey wrote this song out of revenge. And Johnny knew it. And they stayed in the band together for years afterwards.
This isn't one that's likely to make you misty eyed. But imagine these guys onstage at CBGBs doing this song and staring daggers at each other, and at the very least it should make you pretty uncomfortable.
Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds - "Still In Love"
This is the second creepiest song that's going to be on this list (wait for the next one). It starts with a mournful, tinkling piano and a droning guitar, and then Cave comes in with this:
"The cops are hanging around the house/ Cars outside look like they've got the blues/ The moon don't know if it's day or night/ Everybody's creeping around with plastic covers on their shoes..."
Um, what?
The song goes on for awhile, and then we get to the chorus -- "you might think I'm crazy/ but I'm still in love with you" -- and that's when you realize the song is about a murder-suicide.
And then you go take a hot shower.
Moving on...
Pink Floyd - "Don't Leave Me Now"
If that last one didn't give you the shivers, this one (off of "The Wall") is bound to.
Coming after the shrieking rock-star freakout of "One Of My Turns," we find Pink (Bob Geldoff in the movie, probably Syd Barrett in real life) begging his girlfriend (or wife, maybe) not to leave him.
The music drones and drones and drones, and Roger Water' warbles lines like "Oh babe...don't leave me now...how could you go...when you know how I need you...to beat to a pulp on a Saturday night...OH BABE...WHY ARE YOU RUNNING AWAY?"
I can't think of another song that feels like a more thorough portrait of insanity. I'm guessing that Mel Gibson can relate.
Brenda Lee - "I'm Sorry"
This one is kind of hard to explain. It's definitely schmaltzy. But something about the combination of her voice, the crooning chorus behind her, and the melancholy violins just sort of plucks at my heart strings. What can I say?
I also find it interesting that it's pretty clear in the subtext that it's about how she screwed around on somebody. That seems kind of daring for a pop song of that era.
Lefty Frizzell - "Long Black Veil"
Country music offers some of the worst offenders in the cheesy/clichéd heartbreak genre. It almost seems as though a secret cabal in Nashville issued a decree sometime around 1953 that no songs would be allowed that didn't involve a cowboy crying into his beer and/or moaning about how his woman done him wrong. All other ideas are penned up and shipped off to the musical equivalent of Siberia.
But occasionally a good one kind of sneaks in under the fence and makes a break for it.
The neat trick of this one is that it's a ghost story, and the heartbreak isn't the narrator's (he's dead), but rather belongs to the woman he left behind. He looks on from up above (or from down below...he did screw his best friend's wife, after all) and relates the story with a cool, wistful detachment that somehow makes the tragedy hit home that much harder.
It's Frizzell's laconic delivery that makes the song work. I've heard covers -- even Johnny Cash's -- which play toward the melodrama rather than against it. Frizzell just gives us the facts, and in doing so he manages to craft a song that is both creepy and strangely powerful.
Charley Pride - "Does My Ring Hurt Your Finger"
Here's another one, like the Jim Croce song, where the simplicity of the story really works in this song's favor. And, like Frizzell, Pride's uninflected vocal performance gives it a weary, almost cynical edge that plays nicely against the minefield of clichés that accompanies all of these country ballads.
The National - "Sorrow"
"Sorry's my body on the waves/ Sorrow's a girl inside my cave/ I live in a city sorrow built/ It's in my honey, in my milk..."
That kind of achingly twee sentiment could have made this song go horribly awry, but when coupled with the minimalistic approach to the music and singer Matt Berninger's softly rumbling baritone, the feeling the song evokes is of the quiet hollowness that accompanies heartbreak rather than the drama of the heartbreak itself.
The central idea is summed up in the chorus -- "I don't want to get over you" -- and the music builds to just enough of a swirl around it to drive that sense of loss home, while keeping restrained and staying just a few steps shy of sentimentality.
Altogether, this is one of the most beautifully rendered sonic portraits of a man lost in the sea of his own regrets that I can remember.
The Beatles - "Rocky Raccoon"
This may seem an odd choice. I think most people look at this song as a gentle parody of the type of cheeseball country ballad I was lamenting before.
But, like the Brenda Lee song, there's just something about McCartney's voice and the simple, melancholy guitar that makes this one resonate for me in a way that even McCartney himself probably didn't intend. He pretty much drops the satire as soon as he stops aping Merle Haggard after the first few verses and slides effortlessly back into his trademark falsetto. As goofy as it is, this manages to be a weirdly affecting song about a poor kid who tries to stand up for the woman he loves and gets a bullet in the side for his trouble.
The Pogues - "Fairytale of New York"
I don't think I even need to say anything about this song. It's essentially perfect. I could listen to this, and only this, for the rest of my life and be perfectly happy.
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