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Songs of broken hearts

The New Neo Posted on by

There are countless songs about broken hearts. It’s a natural subject, because the phenomenon of hearbreak is so common, and people undergoing the pain of the experience often turn to music to release their emotions, universalize them, and even for catharsis.

I confess to personal experience on the matter.

Folk songs have dealt with it for centuries. Here are two of the most popular songs on the subject:

The metaphor in that second song – of leaning against an oak tree thought to be strong, which then unexpectedly breaks – is common in many folk songs of the genre.

And then there are the Bee Gees – you knew they’d sneak in there, didn’t you? – with one of their most well-known songs, “How Can You Mend a Broken Heart?” They wrote it after their own breakup as a group, which lasted about eighteen months at the end of the 1960s, during their first brush of many with fame. They suffered during that break, and wrote a few huge hits on the day they first reunited.

This was one of them. Note the ideas expressed about mending broken hearts contains a contradiction – or you might say a progression. Initially, it’s described with metaphors that make it seem impossible to do, and then possible with help. The lyrics contrast the naïve hopefulness of youth with the painful revelations of the sorrows of life, and the possibility of healing.

Of all the other heartbreak songs – and there are so so many to choose from – I’m going to select what might perhaps seem an odd choice: “Unbreak My Heart” sung by Toni Braxton. I find it to be a lyrically interesting twist on the nearly-cliched broken heart theme because it posits not just an ordinary healing or recovery or mending (or not), but some sort of going back in time to undo the heartbreak entirely. Braxton also has a remarkable lower register:

But in my book, this last one is the most heartrending of heartbreak songs. The cri de coeur in the third verse – “What I can’t understand/Oh please God hold my hand/Why it should have happened to me” – expresses a desperate appeal that comes from utter desolation.

Here’s to healing or even unbreaking.

Comments

Songs of broken hearts — 39 Comments

  3. Neo, here’s a point at which you and I can intersect . . .

    https://www.bbc.com/news/entertainment-arts-17798956

    21 April 2012
    Bee Gees singer Robin Gibb wakes from coma

    “The 62-year-old fell into a coma after contracting pneumonia in his battle against colon and liver cancer. Gibb’s wife Dwina has revealed he cried when she played him Roy Orbison’s 1962 song Crying.”

    —–

    (It was 1961 — at least in the USA it was — but what does the BBC know?)

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roy_Orbison_discography

  4. M J R:

    The Bee Gees have mentioned many times that that song was a big inspiration for them when young.

    I love that song too.

  5. Roy Orbison is kind of an underrated influence for a lot of the British Invasion acts. The Beatles toured with him in 1963 and really loved him and of course George Harrison would be in a group with him 25 years later.

    The fact that he was my age when he died amazes me.

  6. Kate & Anna McGarrigle … That brought back memories. I had all but forgotten about them, hadn’t thought of them in years. I’m pretty sure I had that album. I must have lost it along with all the rest of my records in a burglary in 1978. I need to get a new copy for old times sake.

  7. Probably the oldest broken-heart song in English– “Greensleeves,” first written down for publication in 1580. Although there’s a persistent belief that Henry VIII wrote the song for Anne Boleyn during their secret relationship, the tune reflects an Italian style of composition– which did not reach England until the Elizabethan period.

    Anyway, here’s a contemporary a cappella version by Peter Hollens and Tim Foust:

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-3iE4IStfRs&ab_channel=PeterHollens

  8. “Heart Like a Wheel” has been among my favorites since I was a teenager, along with “Barbara Allen” and “The Water Is Wide.”

  12. My understanding of the Barbara Allen ballad is that Sweet William was not dying so much from a broken heart as from the poison administered to him by Barbara after she was slighted in the tavern. The same poison that she then used to commit suicide.

  14. Snow falling ourside. I can hardly see the barn through the woods. Lounging around drinking coffee inside, trying to put off winterizing the plumbing in the old place. So since I have a signal, I decide look in on Neo and her crew.

    And what do I see? Lost love, heart break, wrenching emotion and heartaches.

    In sterner times our own grandparents felt heartaches and expressed them through music too

    Sometimes, it seems, in a rhumba rhythm. Because, if you are going to be sad, why not be happy while you are going through it!

    Now, I was convinced that I had heard a version that included a siren whistle puncuating the bars here and there, but alas I have not found it.

    Here are 1938 heartaches delivered in a way that topped the charts for 13 weeks in 1947.

    Sorry I could not set it up to play automatically … lousy YouTube commercials, and video intro… Kinda telegraphs the punch and spoils the effect. Nonetheless ..

    https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Syz5AvpJ5Yo

  15. Look at the era you picked… ie. the last time women seemed to love their men..
    after that you got jagged little pill and tons of other things like effervescence requiring that someone else make them ‘feel’…

    The idea embodied in Paul McCartneys Silly Little Love Songs seemed like something that would never end… but it did… its quite the jagged, no contorted thing it was once represented as and sacred as…

    Much like the S.C.U.M manifesto and other tropes, Jagged little pill became a ‘Musical’.

    Is she perverted like me?
    Would she go down on you in a theater?
    Does she speak eloquently
    And would she have your baby?
    I’m sure she’d make a really excellent mother
    ‘Cause the love that you gave that we made
    Wasn’t able to make it enough for you
    To be open wide, no
    And every time you speak her name
    Does she know how you told me
    You’d hold me until you died
    ‘Til you died, but you’re still alive
    And I’m here, to remind you
    Of the mess you left when you went away
    It’s not fair, to deny me
    Of the cross I bear that you gave to me
    You, you, you oughta know

  17. “Heart Like a Wheel” has a been a favorite of mine for a very, very long time. I am more familiar with Ronstadt version, but the original posted above by Neo is better in my opinion.

    The song often reminds me of “The Rose”, a song written a few years later, in the opening chords.

  18. Don McClean did a decent cover of “Crying” when I was a teenager- it even made it to the top 5 on the Billboard charts. However, Orbison couldn’t be topped, though he did a very, very good version with KD Lang in the late 80s.

  19. There are different kinds of broken hearts. To lose a romantic partner is certainly a blow. Most of us know what it’s like to be rejected by someone we want to be with. It’s a nearly universal experience. Thus, the many songs of heart break. Usually, we get over it. We move on. But a few get stuck. If they are songwriters, they produce something that helps them deal with it.

    There’s another type of broken heart that is more difficult to deal with. That’s the loss of a spouse or a child to premature death. Having lost a child, I know and feel for parents whose children have died. Every day I see headlines of shootings, car wrecks and other accidents that have claimed the lives of children. And know how much heart break there is going to be for those parents. How difficult it is to make sense of. Why God would let it happen.

    During my years of grieving, two songs seemed to speak to me. “Danny Boy,” because it speaks to the universal love of parents for their children down through the ages.
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DquA6KyHTos

    The other was “Climb Every Mountain,” from The Sound of Music. The lyrics spoke to us about our son’s too short life.

    “Climb every mountain
    Search high and low
    Follow every by-way
    Every path you know

    Climb every mountain
    Ford every stream
    Follow every rainbow
    Till you find your dream

    A dream that will need
    All the love you can give (All the love you can give)
    Every day of your life
    For as long as you live

    Climb every mountain
    Ford every stream
    Follow every rainbow
    Till you find your dream
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jvDFoF9sfQA

    Broken hearts can mend and songs can help.

  20. J.J.
    Not much worse. Suicide is something to be watched for if you have some position within or near the family.

    Vince Gill, “Go Rest High On That Mountain” gets me. Brother killed overseas in 1970.

    Notified a family in 1971, Various things to do over the years. Found out maybe late Eighties Mom was gone . Found out about three years ago, she killed herself five years after I knocked on their door.

    Praying for ease of heart. I replay memories as if they’re CDs. Kind of a comfort.

  21. WRT art Travers, That’s “Carrickfergus”, I believe.
    I note the not uncommon muted “m” before “But”, or in other songs, any word starting with a B. Anybody know why?

  22. When I first began learning Welsh music, I thought they didn’t sing about anything except broken hearts!
    This was my “gateway” – the King’s Singers’ 1985 arrangement of the classic tune, with harp. They sing it in Welsh, which is the only way it can really be done right, but the literal translation is in the comments.

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zPEg-6A3I8I

    PS to PA Cat – Greensleeves was amazing!
    And thanks to all the others who filled out the playlist for Radio New Neo.

  25. Richard Aubrey, no job worse than being a CACO. Shared an office with an officer who was a designated CACO in our Naval unit IMO, he was as brave and compassionate as one can be. It took its toll. He lasted nine months in the job. I was thankful I didn’t get the job after him. Life is full of everyday heroes and people carrying heavy burdens. We’re often too busy or self-involved to take note.

  27. J.J. In our shop, we had a roster. I was in charge for about a year. Casualty branch called, I checked the roster and I guess I had a Look when I went to find who was up.
    I came around a couple of times.

  31. On the Road to Fairfax County – The Roches
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GawyW1BqmEI
    In love with an outlaw, but then …

    A 3-sister group which did a fine Hallelujah Chorus, a song I loved to sing at the Naval Academy, and the reason I got their album. Here’s a live version:
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iEtSkJDA61g

    But my favorite is “Steady with the Maestro”, more interestingly fun.
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-oc-c2iAPzU

    I’ve long thought Neo’s enjoyment of sibling harmonies would lead her to The Roches, sometime. Now it’s after Black Friday so Christmas is in the air.

    Tho I like Tommy James better. I was surprised none there mentioned my favorite song of theirs, “Crystal Blue Persuasion”
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XDl8ZPm3GrU
    (with Vietnam, protests, and hula hoops)

    Why does a Good, All Powerful God allow Evil?
    Because of Free Will …
    doesn’t seem to be a good enough reason to many,
    but it’s good enough for me.

  32. Sonny Thompson wrote Drown In My Own Tears and I’m Tore Down. Freddie King TEARS it up (I’m Tore Down)
    https://youtu.be/YB52eLfirFA
    On the somber scale Gordon Lightfoot’s Early Morning Rain may not be 100% a tragic love song…but that’s my impression. A huge favorite.
    I appreciate the topics you share; I learn a lot.

  33. Copperdawg, according to Wikipedia (I know not necessarily 100% reliable) Drown In My Own Tears (originally I’ll Drown In My Tears) was written by Henry Glover, not Thompson. But Thompson performed on the original recorded version of the song with his wife-to-be Lula Reed:

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FzgHXiMuMUI

    I was knocked out a few years ago when I first heard this, I had not known there was a version before the more well-known one by Ray Charles. While Reed was not a singer on a par with Charles this is incredibly soulful.

  38. “Why does a Good, All Powerful God allow Evil?
    Because of Free Will … doesn’t seem to be a good enough reason to many,
    but it’s good enough for me.”

    Reporting on the fly here … But what you just brought up happened to have crossed my mind, if somewhat inchoately, about a week ago.

    And the perfectly respectable standard model answer you gave just now, suddenly appeared to me – rightly or mistakenly I am not yet sure – as an aspect, like Neo’s iceberg, of a larger and more submerged question.

    But first, among various theodicies popular among Christians – a sect of humans for whom the “problem of evil” is considered real – let me state that that answer, i.e., “free will”, is an explanation which is widely recognized, plausible, and seemingly capable of intellectual justification.

    However, if on the other hand you believe that life, or existence itself is an illusion in an absolute sense, then the problem does not exist in the same way. Or, if you assume that humans are mere meat machines – thus implying our consciousness of evil as a concept distinct from the sheer experience of pain and despair – then “evil” is also on some level also an illusion, albeit of a material or naturalistic kind. Then in both of those cases the problem of evil is not an objective problem “out there”; but instead a psychological artifact of our fundamentally delusional, and thus illusory on one level or another, organic lives.

    But if you take persons as opposed to bodies as having real meaning, and take the objective world as both real and as independent of our minds, but nonetheless as fundamentally intelligible too, then, evil in the context you specify, is a problem. And given all that, then “free will”, is not a bad stab at an answer.

    But in a sense, and while granting its value as an answer, “free will” is merely a local descriptor that is particularly relevant to us of a larger phenomenon. An aspect, one might say, of the issue which is more obscure and more general, yet at the same time somehow more obvious.

    And as I see it, what it would logically have to do with, this bigger something, is it being the necessary consequence of the intended existence of a reality that is really real; meaning vis-a-vis mankind, a reality truly bigger, and harder, and more independent than any possible play-pretend world could be: i.e., a reality capable of the most horrendous consequences; a reality with no net; a reality true to the principles of a manifestation of mass and momentum and effects completely indifferent to any and all persons, or even ultimately to outcomes, for that matter.

    In order for reality to be really, deeply real, virtually anything has to be possible no matter how destructive. Only then, does the free will of intending beings even have any meaning in the context in which they operate. Failing that, life is just a multiple choice quiz in a scripted pseudo reality, a predetermined routine leading to a preordained conclusion. The devastating nothing which penetrates and ruins, is what makes reality not-a-game.

    The universe kills all, the good, the bad, the innocent the guilty, and the indifferent, because it is real. A real God, wanting real creatures, could not logically make it any other way.

    Or so it seemed to me as I lay drowsing in an easy chair thinking about where I was going to hunt the next day

  39. I think I was probably asleep when I wrote that one above too. Well, “Ask and Ye Shall Receive.” Don’t ask, and you might just receive anyway.

    I’ll say goodnight now, Zaphod.

    “Goodnight now, Zaphod”

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