The Large Hadron Collider of the Heart

The Shins – “Gone for Good”
(from Chutes Too Narrow)

As with all these sorts of things, I saw it coming, but it still came out of nowhere. It was like a basketball to the face; of course you see it coming, but you can’t move out of its path, and you don’t really believe it’s going to hit you until you hear it collide with your skull.

It wasn’t one of those “big” breakups. We’d only been together for a couple of months –enough time to get to know each other, but not enough time to understand the mechanics, which I think makes things worse –when you don’t know why things happen the way they do in a relationship, when you’re not sure what made those formidable bridges of expectation fall to bricks all around you.

Jens Lekman – “A Little Lost”

Appropriately for a post-rockist romance, we met at a Jens Lekman concert, where the starry disco lights, swelling ballads and the sweet Swedish crooner’s honey tones set just the right mood for a swoon. Then we found out that we knew each other already; I’d commissioned him to do an illustration for my magazine months ago, and we had exchanged a lot of pleasantly-mannered and modestly flirtatious emails. If every great love needs a great story to hold it together, this one, I thought, was clearly meant to be. How could an encounter so enchanted not lead to a legendary affair?

But as sultry June snuck up on us, he decided to move to a farm in western Wisconsin for a few months, and he decided to leave whatever was between us behind.

Sharon Jones & the Dap Kings – “Something’s Changed”
(from 100 Days, 100 Nights)

In college, where I was accustomed to the blunt bottoming-out of things I’d come to trust, I did a radio show, once a semester, bitterly titled “Love Can Suck It.” I’m over the phrase “suck it” these days, and I live a much more balanced emotional life, and I don’t let men shit all over my heart the way I used to.

But after this sudden and saddening break –a strain all the more because neither of us found it quite possible to talk about the subtleties of our affection for each other, and because it feels like one of those loves that wouldn’t have ended except for some clumsy circumstances –I found myself pawing through my music catalog, frantically searching for the right songs to bring succor and guidance to my rancorous heart.

The Brothers Four – “Greenfields”
(from Folk, Gospel & Blues: Will the Circle Be Unbroken)

There are more songs about this kind of garbage than there are molecules in the known world, and picking just the right ones requires a measure of randomness. Why isn’t there a Large Hadron Collider for plumbing the mysteries of human heartache, with all of its tiny black holes?

The Starlets – “I Sold My Heart to the Junkman”
(from Girl Group Sounds Lost And Found (One Kiss Can Lead To Another))

Of all the stories these songs tell –the treacherous first steps into a love we know will be trouble, the gnawing anxiety that something isn’t right, that ridiculous impulse to sell your heart to the junkman (and not because you’re in love with a junkman, which was what I initially took this song to mean) –the only number that doesn’t entirely make sense to me is Mark Mallman’s power ballad “Knockout on 22^nd Street,” which is, for all intents and purposes, about boxing. I guess it’s also about lost opportunities, and lost grip on life’s chaos. I guess it’s like my friend said when I called him to wail it out: “you can’t win them all.” In any case, it’s practically the only song I’ve really listened to for the past two weeks, in endless and deafening repeat in my car, day after day, in moments of buoyant clarity and moments of sinking despair.

Mark Mallman – “Knockout on 22nd St.”
(from Between the Devil and the Middle C)

We all make ourselves vulnerable to love; sometimes it’s beautiful, and sometimes it tears us apart. Which is why, if you’re like me, you go into these things not with giddy schoolkid thrill, but under the crush of excruciating anxiety.

A long time ago a man I loved told me that love is just like music: there has to be tension, suspense, something at stake. There has to be dissonance in order for there to be resolution. And the resolution is what music is all about; that’s what moves us. And so it is with love. Maybe that’s why music seems so infinitely suited for the love we make, take, and break, over and over again.

Bob Dylan – “Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right”
(from The Freewheelin’)