Songs for the Dumped

By Elisabeth Donelly, PopMatters. Posted November 12, 2004.

After you've been dumped by your significant other, a magical thing occurs. Every single pop song is the story of your life, your tenuous emotional state-poignant and sad-realized in beautiful music.

Of course, the magic of music is the last thing on your mind during a breakup. Now I've broken off relationships in many locations: backstage at rock clubs, on the beach, in a restaurant, in Canada. As traumatic as those breakups were, (and try breaking up with somebody in a place as small as Boston. There are too many ghosts.) the worst one was my so-called First Boyfriend, who dumped me during a 3 a.m. walk on the Charles River Esplanade in a driving, pounding rain. It turned out for the best – I was a pawn standing between a love story of Dawson-Leery-and-Joey-Potter-sized proportions, and the soul mates are still dating today. At the time, I was miserable and all I could see was that I was really hurt at being abruptly dumped with such a lack of finesse. In his defense, however, we were nineteen.

My feelings were so confused after that breakup. It left me in a prime position to fall madly in love with something. It's an inverse of that giddy lovestruck feeling at the start of a relationship when every John Cusack character acts as an indelible reminder of your love. Instead of being in love with love, now every song with misery, angst, and pain becomes a secret code into my inner life! There were no friends waiting to hug me when I had my first breakup; I ran into the open arms of music, looking for solace.

I found it in the serendipitous discovery of Spoon. As a struggling music writer, I had to keep my eye out for new bands and there were lots of articles in places like Magnet and Spin plugging Spoon and their new album, "Girls Can Tell." My curiosity was piqued with the endless Elvis Costello comparisons and when I called my editor at the local alt-weekly to ask about the band, he said that the CD had just reached the offices that day.

Turns out that Spoon's new album was a total breakup album, and I was instantly smitten. Britt Daniel spends the whole album fuming bitterly and wistfully over some lost opportunity (the major label deal? his girl?) and the jumpy, poppy music laced with new wave keyboards adds an exciting level of god-what's-gonna-happen-next? tension.

Most importantly, though, in my super-sensitive state the album was clearly a lyrical attempt by Daniel to sing about my life. The first song's repeated, "I go to sleep and think that you're next to me," hit me right in my new empty bed. Even the most mundane lines worked for me with context of the seductive music and Daniel's sexy, raspy voice: "She eats right/ but hurts/ and says it could've been good by now." The regret and self-pity in the line is overcome by the feeling, the familiar "coulda shoulda woulda" idea that Daniel had felt and passed onto the listeners. I was in love with this album and found that it was perfectly sequenced, with a cathartic weeper as goodbye.

"Chicago at Night" has Daniel lingering on the visual of a lonely girl on a plane going to Chicago. She's gone away from him, maybe into a bright new future like that Liz Phair song "Stratford-on-guy." In Phair's song, the girl is "flying into Chicago at night," but the exuberant chorus realizes a kind of nonsensical Zen peace: "It took an hour/ maybe a day/ but once I really listened the noise/ just went away." Coming at the end of an archetypical college-girl breakup album, it's clear that everything will be alright with the zooming guitar and Phair's small glorious epiphanies about the nature of life.

The post-breakup mood gives music more emotional importance, something akin to the truth in that line that Jeff Magnum warbles, "sweet silly music is meaningful, magical." I invested so much of my break-up emotions in the Spoon album so that I could get over them. Emotions do shift, and my infatuation with Spoon lasted for the duration of a weepy month. Days passed, the sadness faded, and the album lost the luster of being a concept album about me. Eventually "Girls Can Tell" was just another excellent album in my collection.

Breakup albums can become a habit, a way to deal with pain (And do note that I mean breakup albums in relationship to the listener being "broken up," unlike the artist). It's very easy to trace your romantic history out in music. For me it goes something like Spoon, Fiona Apple, Veruca Salt, The Walkmen, and Lyle Lovett. Your mileage may vary – in a poll of my friends, I've found that there's usually a "bitter boy album" slot of the Elvis Costello variety or something that's emo if they're sensitive, the Dirty Three if their sensitivity transcends mere words, and many a girl has a mopey girl album in her collection, Joni Mitchell if she's annoying, Tori if she's loopy, and Fiona if she's smart.

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