Anatomy of a breakup: playlist fun!

Billy Wilder supposedly had a rule about the projects he worked on: if he was feeling depressed, he worked on a comedy; and if life felt great, he worked on bleak stories and tragedies. It grounded the laffs in real pain, and it leavened the darkness of the dramas to have them come from an upbeat (at the time) auteur.

Which is a roundabout way to say, there's almost no musical genre that I find more weirdly satisfying during happy chapters of my life than the breakup song. They absolutely serve their purpose during the freefall and rebuild, but there's something kind of delightful about rocking them out when you're not wrestling with relational Hard Times. As a category, they tend to be rich - either cutting against the pain or wallowing in it, letting out a wild surface-level howl or burrowing into the heart of what feels broken forever.

Either way, I have a weird and powerful love of 'em.
I could probably do an entirely separate playlist on songs that have gotten me through breakups, but that's not what this is. "Next Year," for example, got me through the back half of 2016's crawl back to feeling like a human, but it's not a breakup song on its own terms. These are the songs that are clearly, in some way, responding to/describing/anticipating a breakup.



I tried to pull a range of tunes from stages of breakup/grieving - from the pre-breakup rumblings ("I'm Losing You," Dione Warwick and Bill Withers, etc) to the various iterations of self-blame, resentment, and anger from that pinball stages-of-grief era that eventually finds you to your new normal. And you know, just a taste or two of the "light on the horizon" tunes that sometimes act as hope and sometimes as validation. For some reason, this playlist sticks to pop/rock - there's an ocean of breakup jazz and showtunes out there, but for some reason those are tunes I almost only ever listen to when actually heartbroken, so no thanks for today, Jack. In general, what I prize for this list is a certain sense of raw honesty - sometimes a little mawkish, sometimes a little awful or meanspirited, the kinda messy songwriting that sticks with you one way or another.

I started collecting these songs years n years ago, before my grad school chapter began, and have slowly added to the pile over the years. Sometimes I went looking when things were rough and I needed catharsis/validation, and sometimes I grabbed things I stumbled across during happy times, when you hear emotionally raw tunes in a different way. So this week, in honor of... uhhhh, Valentine's Day?... a playlist that I hope you can enjoy in seasons of joy and plenty, and that can give you the you-are-not-alone bolstering in seasons of hardship. In either case: let's hear it for feeling your feelings in all their complex validity!

Oh, and: I tried to limit this to at least one song per album, which ruled out most of For Emma Forever Ago, a perfect winter-breakup album.* I mention this all mostly to say that "Skinny Love" nearly made the cut in spite of that rule based entirely on one cold, damp February afternoon that it was playing in a Cambridge coffee shop and I heard (this is true) at least 6 other people quietly singing along at the chorus. Sometimes life is magical.



* Some other great breakup albums didn't make this at all even though Blood on the Tracks and Blue are stone-cold classics of the genre.