The Seven Stages of Getting over Heartbreak via Songs
Personally, the song that made me understand the havoc wreaked by heartbreak, was Pearl Jam’s Black. The anguish in Vedder’s voice, as he sums up the hideousness of being estranged from somebody who used to be your everything, is so overt. I can taste it when I sing it; feel it bleed on the edges of my teeth, “I know some day you’ll be a star in somebody else's sky, but why, why, why can't it be, oh, can't it be mine?”
That line features repetition too, something that often crops up in songs, poems, and conversations, about heartache. When we can’t identify the borders of our pain, we fail to really grasp the extent of it. We then tend to be stuck in it. Heartbreak is the black hole in our brain, drawing us towards it, inexorably.
2022’s Spotify Wrapped concluded that I am in the top 1% of UK Spotify listeners, I clocked up 1,897 hours over the year. I process literally everything to music and always find a comrade in song, regardless of the situation I may be in. Considering this, I’m positioning myself as an apothecary, here to dispense an elixir to fast forward the healing process.
To do so, I propose a song for each of the stages of grief, derived from the work of psychologist Elizabeth Kübler-Rossas. Initially, in the 1960s, she came up with 5, this has evolved into 7 stages: shock, denial, isolation, anger, depression, the emotional rollercoaster, and, finally, acceptance.
Why face each stage with music? Because your life might as well be a movie with a killer soundtrack. (Spotify literally has a playlist called My Life is a Movie, probably specifically targeting millennials like me, who all used to buy TV and film soundtracks)
For shock, I prescribe: Frightened Rabbit - Poke
This band doesn’t shy away from visceral imagery. In Death Dream we hear, “I stepped in and found a suicide asleep on the floor, an open mouth, screams and makes no sound, apart from the ring of the tinnitus of silence” and “Butterflied arms, tell me that this one has flown”. In The Woodpile, “There’s no spark on a dampened floor, a snapped limb in an unlit pyre”. Then there’s The Wrestle, “This is the test I left land for, to grip flesh and pull muscle in, the vice clinch of the struggle”
Obviously, there are different types of relationships and of those, the ones we enter into have different lifespans, some short and intense, others not really ever getting off the ground, and then there’s the ones that were nearly forever… Maybe they should have been, but fate, timing, or our own idiocy, foiled it. I picked this song for those of us that have lost what we once believed was going to be the love that outlasted all others and carried us to the grave.
The thing about really loving someone, and declaring it by marriage, (or living together) and building a shared history, by attending dinners, weddings, funerals and birthdays together, is that part of the joy of that rigmarole is how comfortable it feels, it’s easy to assume it will always be that way. You’ve made it to an enviable plateau, when you know the punchline of your partner’s joke in advance, and feel tenderness for their retelling of familiar stories. If you are reading this and smiling smugly to yourself, I’m glad for you. But I must warn, the desolation felt if that is lost is quite consuming, relearning how to operate in a world without the eyes of your partner sharing the burden, can be disconcerting; knowing you’ll never have that intimacy with them again can seem absurd, as it was once the only constant you knew.
This depth, of the shock for that kind of loss, is best captured by Poke,
“You should look through some old photos, I adored you in every one of those
If someone took a picture of us now they’d need to be told
That we had ever clung and tied a navy knot with arms at night
I’d say she was his sister but she doesn’t have his nose”
I love the reference to photographs; we have all been frozen in time, caught on camera, clearly in love. Sometimes we are left haunted by those images. Linking nicely to one of my favourite tracks by The Cure, Pictures of You.
“If only I'd thought of the right words
I could have held on to your heart
If only I'd thought of the right words
I wouldn't be breaking apart all my pictures of you”
Honourable mention: No Doubt - Don’t Speak
For denial, I prescribe: Taylor Swift -Death by a Thousand Cuts
This is my favourite Swift song. The upbeat tempo of the song doesn’t match the words, but that’s part of how denial works, a false hope that the giant declarations might save something - there’s a level of grandiosity when she describes their love as “our country”, and the decadent imagery, “I look through the windows of this love, even though we boarded them up, chandelier still flickering here, ’cause I can't pretend it's okay when it's not”. The chandelier, conjures a picture of a large home, the kind of place with a ballroom and a library, where so many narratives can unfold - the whole inner workings of a life given space to play out.
When it works, love is like that, we literally and metaphorically build homes for ourselves within it. In the case of the Taj Mahal, we build things to commemorate that love too. It’s a beautiful sort of futility that humans try to make something concrete out of something so capricious.
Swift captures the macro and micro impact of relationships in these two lines, the way they play out in both the public and private spheres. If this couple was once united under a flag, and common values, it became “a lawless land” and she’s outside the building looking in- Just beyond the realm of where her authority ends, so, despite it having tettered on brilliance, she doesn’t have enough control to make it so, and all is laid to waste.
There were a lot of memes about the line, “I ask the traffic lights if it’ll be all right, they say, “I don’t know” but I find it really relatable. It ties in with the fast pace of the song, pain can be unrelenting and invasive, the moment there’s space for it to make itself known, it’s there, clamouring for attention. Like at brief pauses in concentration at a red light.
Honourable mention: The Pixies - Hey
This song doesn’t have the typical structure of verse, chorus, verse; it’s sprawling instead. It’s inevitable, when relationships end the view that we held so firmly of them before, starts to distort. I think the bass line in this song hints at the undercurrent from which the truth is emerging.
Then there’s the high pitched and alert, “hey!” And “uh!”, cutting through the melody. It’s jarring, like realisations that arrive without warning. Then, right at the end, Black Francis keeps lamenting, “we’re chained” proof that knowing something is off, doesn’t automatically mean you want to extricate yourself from it.
For isolation, I prescribe: Florence and the Machine - Blinding
“Seems that I have been held,
in some dreaming state
A tourist in the waking world,
never quite awake
No kiss, no gentle word
could wake me from this slumber
Until I realise that it was you who held me under”
I love this imagery of emerging from a cage, crawling out of the prison of your own skin and treachery of your body, yourself a stranger that you gave away now returning. It’s a solitary reckoning, a war for one.
“Felt it in my fists, in my feet, in the hollows of my eyelids
Shaking through my skull, through my spine and down through my ribs”
I hate the word and concept of “rebirth”, but nevertheless, it fits. A new iteration of who you are, minus somebody else, is going to emerge. Parents probably go through a similar thing, maybe it’s on the same line as empty nest syndrome. You suddenly have so much more time alone, and space in your brain where you’re not considering another, it can be daunting and uncomfortable to see what replaces them.
I remember wondering if I’d ever be able to read a book aloud with another partner, without feeling stained by the fact that it was an intimacy I’d shared with a previous one, but in time I realised, I was the catalyst for that shared act, and it wasn’t a part of myself I had to leave behind or attribute to someone else.
Honourable mention: Lauryn Hill - Ex Factor
The title shows she knows it’s over, but there’s a double meaning here… The ex, had an X factor that made them her 42, which, according to a supercomputer featured in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, is, “the answer to the Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe, and Everything.”
Both Lauren Hill and the Yeah Yeah Yeahs (in Maps) use direct address, pleading, “see no one loves you more than me, and no one ever will” and “wait, they don’t love you like I love you” respectively. As a technique, direct address is used for connection, but I always think these songs are the internal monologues never actually shared, because there’s no progression from the initial statements, no further development of thought, no insight gained. There’s little point in imploring someone to stay with the admission you’ve given your very best, because they already knew that and still decided to leave.
We know the American Dream is a fantasy, constructed to prop up capitalism, but we can’t help but believe there’s some truth in it… If we work hard enough we can attain anything, and all that jazz. It stands to reason we might apply the same logic to love, and if we do it with our chest, how could we possibly fail? It’s lonely, unpicking these ideologies perpetuated so frequently in popular culture.
For anger, I prescribe a Jagged Little Pill combination of: Nine Inch Nails - Somewhat Damaged and Alanis Morissette - You Oughta Know
While these may seem an unlikely pairing, NIN an industrial rock outfit and Morissette more alt rock/pop; NIN having never made an entry into the UK charts, while Morissette has had 10 entries into the top 40; both albums that these tracks appear on seem to pivot around the end of a relationship - even their titles, ‘The Fragile’ and ‘Jagged Little Pill’ directly correlate with the outcome of grappling with breakups. Both songs have outright hostility and accusations in them.
When Reznor challenges, “Lick around divine debris, taste the wealth of hate in me” it’s clear that this is a rage that’s feeding and sustaining his momentum. Sometimes pain can be a motivator.
Then, the last third of the song is written in a 4/4 time signature while the lyrics are sung in a clashing one. The peculiar structure, coupled with a cacophony of percussion, and a crescendoing chorus synth, makes the listener feel the intense claustrophobia of rage that hasn’t yet been spent and has no outlet.
“How could I ever think?
It’s funny how
Everything you swore would never change,
Is different now, Like you said,
You and me make it through
Didn’t quite, fell apart,
Where the fuck were you?”
When asked about You Oughta Know, Alanis Morissette explains, “I was writing it so I didn't get sick. I was writing it to get it out of my body“ she refused to internalise the debris Reznor revels in and threw it outwards instead. "I didn't write it to get back. Everybody called it the perfect revenge song, but that's not what it was. It's a devastated song, and in order to pull out of that despondency, being angry is lovely. I think the movement of anger can pull us out of things.” Seeing it from this angle, makes the slew of difficult questions she poses, in both verses and the chorus, all the more poignant. They weren’t asked to humiliate but more to hasten her recovery and to look at things face on.
“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””
For depression, I prescribe: Jeff Buckley - Lover, You Should Have Come Over
It might be the former English teacher in me, but my awe of this song preceded my entrance into that career, so it must be my inner geek that instinctively appreciates the pathetic fallacy in the opening. “Looking out the door I see the rain fall upon the funeral mourners, parading in a wake of sad relations, as their shoes fill up with water”. This song is like poetry, with the verve of Auden.
“It’s never over
My kingdom for a kiss upon her shoulder
It’s never over
All my riches for her smiles
When I’ve slept so soft against her
It’s never over
All my blood for the sweetness of her laughter
It’s never over
She is the tear that hangs inside my soul forever”
It’s 7 minutes of anguish, there’s repetition, there’s high notes and there’s pleading. I can’t stress enough how profoundly beautiful this song is, but I can guarantee it’s the catharsis required when dealing with misery.
Honourable mention: David Bowie - Letter to Hermione
Bowie, a musical genius, notorious for lyrics that are sharp, astute and witty; but this song is delicate, stripped back and raw, making it completely disarming. The tenderness in the opening, is revelatory, “The hand that wrote this letter sweeps the pillow clean, so rest your head and read a treasured dream, I care for no one else but you.”
When we truly love people, we find small, almost insignificant ways to improve their lives or make their existence easier, we want to do that long after they’re gone. When he says, ”I'm not quite sure what I'm supposed to do, so I'll just write some love to you” I can feel that honesty in my bones.
Of all the stages, I think depression is the one that lasts the longest. It’s the one that the old cliche about “time“ really applies to.
For Reconstruction/the rollercoaster, I prescribe: Avril Lavigne (feat. Mark Hoppus) - All I Wanted
“I was always yelling when I should’ve been sitting down
Memories of cigarettes and polaroids
Kiss you in the kitchen of a house that burned down”
The mother fucking princess herself has to make an entry here, because pop punk is the ideal genre for the rollercoaster phase. The lyrics above open the song, and set a frenetic pace, like Swift earlier, Lavigne uses the imagery of a ruined home, but she celebrates the chaos of being within it, embracing the fleeting romance of poetic moments.
This song is a duet too; competing clashing thoughts driving the narrative on. Two sides of the same story.
“We’re floating to the nothingness ‘cause, after all, the truth is
The only things we leave behind are noise and absolution
I act like everything is fine, but I’m plotting revolution”
There’s often a pivotal moment before everything goes awry. We usually realise this too late, see it in our rearview mirror, not when it’s staring back at us. This song makes me think of that moment. How we will pledge to fight ourselves and our instincts and shortcomings in the future, because love is all there is, and we know this is unavoidable and we want a chance to do it better next time.
Honourable mention: Billie Eilish - Happier than Ever
The epic mood shift at break neck speed.
For acceptance, I prescribe: Celeste - Strange
Closing off the list is this gem, a song many will probably forever associate with the pandemic and lockdowns, appropriate because of the devastating melancholia.
“Isn’t it strange
How people can change
From strangers to friends
Friends into lovers
And strangers again?”
It’s the use of, “people“ rather than “we“ that shows the depth of understanding we can gain from processing a breakup, our personal pain, once so singular, we now understand is actually a universal experience and this acknowledgement, gives us hope.
Celeste said the song was inspired by the California wildfires in 2018, “I began to think of all the destruction the fires caused, the loss, the isolation, people finding themselves in a situation where they have no home, no sense of familiarity.”
Allowing ourselves to find our bearings when we have become unmoored, and then navigate on, rather than retrace our steps, is valiant. And, strange, because in the other phases, we didn't know we’d be capable and then we just started doing it again.
Honourable mention: Leonard Cohen - Hey, That’s No Way to Say Goodbye
I grew up on Leonard Cohen, and he’s always comforting to me, the richness of his voice and unflinching honesty in the scenarios he illustrates. This song is no exception, and the way he references nature is the grounding reminder we all need when we are struggling.
“I’m not looking for another as I wander in my time,
walk me to the corner, our steps will always rhyme
you know my love goes with you as your love stays with me,
it’s just the way it changes, like the shoreline and the sea, ”
I hope you find some comfort, or release, or companionship, with these recommendations, they’ve certainly been some of my favourite allies on long lonely midnights.
