Entertainment For Lively Minds
Songs to mend a broken heart
Posted by art vanderlay on 21 March 2011 - 11:25pm.
I was listening to this today and it bought back extremely vivid memories of playing it over and over when a girl I loved very much at the time left me. Even at times like that there was a part of me that realised on some level I was enjoying the bittersweet feeling of love lost. Of course it's much easier when your in your early 20's and there are no kids involved and you can make a clean break and enter the water once more.
At the time though the words 'you must understand that wonderland is only in fairy tales' was never far from my mind of the record deck.
Anyone else have any songs that have soothed or at least been the soundtrack to a broken heart?
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Not soothing, but
after a relationship ended disastrously many years back, I found myself being unable to listen to either Dylan's 'Most Of The Time' or Bonnie Raitt's 'I Can't Make You Love Me' without chucking a big wobbly one.
I knew I was getting over it when I could listen to one of the tracks the whole way through.
Can’t find a clip of the Dylan track, but…
Not sure whether it helped
or hindered the healing of the heart but The Four Tops' version of Jimmy Webb's "Do What You Gotta Do" expressed the sorrowful but dignified magnanimity in the face of loss that I aspired to.
Needless to say, I failed miserably and was instead a ranting, soggy mess of accusation and self-recrimination. Which actions had the precise effect of driving the beloved further from my arms and into those of the hated other.
Oh well, our imagined selves are so much finer than our own.
Mind you, still can't hear Levi Stubbs' wounded baritone, intoning the phrase below without a stab to the heart even now.
"Though it may mean I never kiss those sweet lips again
Pay that no mind, just chase that dappled dream of yours
And come on back - see me when you can"
She never did of course.
Always Heartbreaking/Soothing Regret The Blue Nile
The Cure
Pictures of You did the job for me...
Though today any young twenty something girls just been ditched by a long term boyfried would surely be soothed by Adele's simply wondrous "Someone Like You"
The perfect break-up song?
...trying to persuade myself not to think about her
Is like trying to tell the clouds not to pour.
Hey man, that's poetry.
Not a break-up song as such...
But the most cataclysmic heart-melter I ever experienced coincided with a gig by Roger Waters a friend took me to, to sort of cheer me up (Yes, I know, Roger Waters' powers of comic healing and cheery dancing are legendary). It was the first time I really heard 'Comfortably Numb' and as I was 'self-medicating' with bottles of duty-free Jamesons at the time, the song seemed apt. I listened to it non-stop around that time. God, I must have been a little ray of sunshine for my flatmate.
The Reverend Al asked the same questions
I'm afraid he didn't know either.
Doods....
That was a great call, I forgot how astonishingly good his voice is.
Al Green Is Lurve
No two ways about it.
There was a time
when this did the job ever so well.
Two things
Soundtracked my divorce:
Teddy Thompson - Separate Ways
Greg Dulli - Gutter Twins/Afghan Whigs/Twilight Singers.