In truth, I didn’t think I would be saying this, at least not this soon after launching it. I’m a sucker for sad songs, and God knows there are plenty of them. What I didn’t anticipate, though, is how exhausting it would be to go to that dark place, even if it was only every other week. I guess I’m just too happy now to revisit the more unpleasant times in my life.

And so, rather than draw out the misery for months on end, I’m making a final mix tape of every song I ever thought about writing up for this column. White Label Wednesday will continue to run every other week, and in the place of Mope Like Me will be another song column, but one that is decidedly more upbeat. Ta.

Air – Run
Elliott Smith – Everything Means Nothing to Me
Semisonic – She’s Got My Number
World Party – And I Fell Back Alone
Rialto – Love Like Semtex
E – The Day I Wrote You Off
The Jayhawks – A Break in the Clouds
Joe Jackson – The Other Me
Kerli – Fragile
Squeeze – There Is A Voice
Gus – Tell Me What You Can’t Say
R.E.M. – Endgame
Elbow – Powder Blue
XTC – I Can’t Own Her
October Project – Take Me as I Am
Everything but the Girl – Shadow on a Harvest Moon

Instead, he made Raoul and the Kings of Spain. Whoops.

To be fair, the album had its moments, notably the widescreen ballad “Me and My Big Ideas.” Those strings had me from the second note — they just dripped with sadness. By the time the drums slowly faded in with the press roll-SPLASH of the cymbal, I was hooked. Bringing back Oleta Adams as Orzabal’s duet partner didn’t hurt, either. “Me and my big ideas won’t wash away your tears / No one else seems to mind that I’m not that kind,” he says in the first line. My best guess at the song’s intent is that of a couple where the girl fell for the big talking guy who turned out to just be a daydreamer with no real ambition, and now he’s trapped them both. Sort of like “Fairytale of New York,” without the name calling. I could be wrong, though; there is plenty of room in the lyrics for other interpretations.

The song came out as my relationship with College Girlfriend #2 was winding down. Things were actually going fine at the time, but a line towards the end of the song stuck in my craw:

“In a way, the dream is over”

It was over, and I knew it. I was friends at the time with two girls that I knew would be better matches for me than the one I was currently dating (case in point: I wound up marrying one of them), so while things with CG #2 were “fine,” I was stalling. Staying in the relationship was easy, but pointless. Today, the song makes me smile at my own naivete for ever thinking that she and I could overcome anything — pretty much everyone who knew us thought we made a lousy couple — as long as we loved each other. Me and my big ideas.

I always wondered how this song would have done on the charts had it been released as a single from The Seeds of Love, when the band was entering its “mature” phase but still a viable commercial property. By 1995, pop music had no place for either Tears for Fears or a song like this; the lyrics weren’t direct enough — certainly not compared to the following year’s smash hit, Donna Lewis’ “I Love You Always Forever” — and the production, while thick with melancholy, wasn’t saccharine enough. Sigh.

Tears for Fears – Me and My Big Ideas

“Well, it’s not for me to say
But I can’t see what you see in him anyway
But such righteousness in me
Is not a nice thing to display
And who am I, for crissakes, anyway
Oh, to judge a life this way
When my own’s in disarray…”

It would be a great understatement to say that those words spoke to me.

It always amazed me how Ben Watt and Tracey Thorn – who were so protective of their private lives that for years they wouldn’t even acknowledge that they were a couple, never mind a married couple – were capable writing such devastating relationship songs. And they wrote a ton of them: “Cross My Heart,” “Tears All Over Town,” “Walking Wounded,” the list goes on and on. (Don’t be surprised if “Shadow on a Harvest Moon” pops up in this column down the road.) How could a happy couple plunge the depths of despair so realistically? Aren’t these songs supposed to be born out of pain and misery?

“So it’s not for me to say
‘Cause I change my mind from day to day
And when I look at you
I only see bits of myself, anyway
So go on, stop listening to me…”

After I was finished wallowing in self-pity, I realized that this song was telling me to keep my fool mouth shut when it came to other people’s relationships. Insight is great and all, but it’s worthless if you don’t use it to fix your own problems first. A couple years after this song came out, I decided to fix my “problem.” (This is not to say that she was the sole reason the relationship didn’t work. We were a collective problem.) No surprise, my life has been awesome ever since. Huh, maybe that was Tracey’s goal after all; pretend to be sad in order to lure sad people into taking charge of their lives and being happy. That sounds like something a happily married person would do. Thanks for the kick in the pants, Tracey. Now pleasepleasepleaseplease make another EBTG album. It’s been nine years…and, ahem, 12 years since the last one I really liked.

Everything but the Girl – Two Star

Grant Lee Phillips, you have my attention.

“There’s nothing that I said that’ll bring you happiness, happiness
It’s hard to come by, I confess
I’m bad at this thing, happiness
If you find it, share it with the rest of us”

I was indeed bad at that thing happiness, at least when it came to my love life. The rest of my life was pretty awesome, but I gave my girlfriends far, far too much power when it came to how I should feel about myself. I guess I felt like that was the point, to hand yourself over to the other. Took that a tad too literally, I suppose.

“Never mind the words that came
Out of my mouth when all that I could feel was pain…”

Most of that pain was caused by her, of course, but that doesn’t matter; even when they drop the most emotionally crippling anvil on your head, you don’t make things even by hurting them in return. Sometimes, though, it was hard to think rationally when reeling from the latest shot to the gut. “Let’s be clear, honey, do you want to be with a guy LIKE my roommate, or do you want to be with my roommate?”

“The difference in the two of us comes down to the way
You rise over things I just put down…”

That was true; she did have a way of not letting anything get her down. I always wondered how she did it. Was it dogged determination? Subconscious defense mechanism? A little of both, I suppose. I kind of envied her ability to just move on with little time or need for reflection. Man, life would be so much simpler that way.

Grant Lee Buffalo – Happiness

Let it not be said that Cameron Crowe’s Elizabethtown was without its good points.

Actually, I shouldn’t say that. I never saw the movie – the trailer, lengthy running time, questionable casting of Orlando Bloom and Kirsten Dunst, and ultimately the reviews were enough to scare me away – but the impression I get is that it was not good. Whatever the qualities of his movies, though, Crowe always made sure the soundtracks could stand on their own, and sure enough, the music he slipped into Elizabethtown contains his typical blend of Boomer acts (along with the obligatory slot for wife Nancy Wilson) mixed with the occasional offbeat number or deep cut. For me, the album came down to the letter H: “Jesus Was a Crossmaker” by the Hollies, “Let It All Hang Out” by the Hombres, and last but certainly not least, “io (This Time Around)” by Los Angeles space rockers Helen Stellar. Few songs have grabbed me at first listen, and held me, like this one did.

Listen to that echo-laden piano track: it positively reeks of sadness, yet the few words that the band sprinkles into the song are not sad ones. “This time around, you can be anyone / This love of ours…” On second thought, I’m not sure exactly what that means, and I’m sure that was the point. Each listener takes a different journey with a song like this. It may not even be to a fixed point in time; just somewhere…else. For me, it made me feel like I had left something, or someone, behind, and this song was my guide to find it. Or maybe something had left me behind. Either way, it fills me with an overwhelming sense of loneliness. Sweet, beautiful loneliness. And as Kurt Cobain once put it, sometimes I miss the comfort in being sad. This song does it for me every time.

You would have expected Helen Stellar’s appearance on the Elizabethtown soundtrack to have produced a little bit of buzz for the band, either in the form of a major-label deal or an appearance on another soundtrack. (“O.C.” music supervisor and Chop Shop Records founder Alexandra Patsavas is usually all over bands like this.) But so far, no such luck. Who knows, maybe they were offered a deal and turned it down; information on the band was not easy to find. Their MySpace page and official web site both sport a bio that was written before Elizabethtown was released, and there is no Wikipedia page dedicated to the band. That last part is what I find the most amusing. What band doesn’t have a Wikipedia page these days? Hell, the band Felony has a Wiki page. Remember Felony? Exactly. (Pssst: they sang the New Wave song “The Fanatic.”) Anyway, the recent comments on their MySpace page suggest that they’re gigging again and showcasing new material, so here’s hoping their big break comes sooner than later.

Helen Stellar – io (This Time Around)

I was playing this song at work once, and a coworker of mine walked up and said, “Is this the Doors?” I never liked that guy.

It’s the sliding string riff in the chorus that just kills me. The drop from the first to second note is a little bump, but the third and fourth notes…? Much plummeting, as a fellow Popdoser once said in describing Luke Skywalker after he discovered Darth Vader was his father. There are few songs with such a melodic fall into despair as this one boasts.

“A schoolboy yawns, sits back, and hits Return
While ‘round the world, computers crash and burn…”

Neil Hannon takes his good sweet time getting to the point in this song, spending the first two verses talking about butterflies, hurricanes and hackers. What kind of song is this, anyway? Is he really getting this worked up over a punk kid who launches a virus? Of course not: he’s just saving the best for last.

“You must go, and I must set you free
‘Cause only that will bring you back to me…”

Ah, now it makes sense. The storm, the hacker, the girl leaving him: they’re all things he didn’t see coming, but in retrospect, feels that he should have. Inevitable moments that, once he embraces them, will lead to something better. It has to get better, right?

I know that it will happen, I’m sure that it must happen
I know it’s gonna happen, because I believe in the certainty of chance…”

Crash. Huge orchestral swell in that last chorus. And then it goes all “Nights in White Satin” with an odd spoken-word bit from Hannon about how the world will be wonderful, but from whose viewpoint, and that we need to live in a state of suspended animation, like a work of art. Detached. Well, I suppose being detached is one way of keeping your heart from getting broken, though I much prefer the more human, messier way.

I don’t have a sad-sack story associated with this song, like I’ve had for the others. But this is the kind of song that almost makes me wish I could relate it to someone. That’s powerful stuff, wanting to have your heart broken when you hear a song. Unfortunately I don’t think the wife would go along with that, and I don’t really want to get my heart broken again anyway.

Rufus Wainwright recorded a similarly bombastic song a few years later called “Go or Go Ahead.” It features the exact same downward chords as “The Certainty of Chance,” even using the same key. I actually asked Neil Hannon about it once, but he hadn’t heard Wainwright’s song yet (though he told me he loved Wainwright’s music). Hannon laughed off the notion of Wainwright copying him, saying that he (Hannon, not Wainwright) probably stole the downward chord sequence from Debussy or Rachmaninov in the first place. All I know is that there is no way that Rufus Wainwright hasn’t heard this song. I’ll leave it up to you to decide just how much thieving (tribute?) is taking place here.

Divine Comedy – The Certainty of Chance

Rufus Wainwright – Go or Go Ahead

For someone who has gotten almost as cover-friendly in his autumn years as UB40, I’m frankly surprised this hasn’t happened yet. After all, once Mick Hucknall lifted a huge chunk of Daryl Hall and John Oates’ “I Can’t Go for That (No Can Do)” for a 2003 single, you’d think that any and all apprehension about raiding the gold in them thar ‘80s hills would be an afterthought. And yet, somehow, Hucknall has to date resisted recording his own version of a UK Top 10 hit – with a Simply Red-friendly reggae beat, no less – that is fucking begging for him to sing it. Go figure.

But enough about my cover version dreams. This song hooked me from the very first moment I saw the video in the dawning hours of MTV. There was something so heartbreaking about that chorus, no matter how funny the video was. (Keyboardist Tony Hymas should have been an actor, he was so good here.) When the clip ends, with singer Jim Diamond getting carried off in an abandoned car by a junkyard magnet, I just wanted to cry. They’re sending him off to die! Won’t somebody do something?

Six years later, I distinctly remembered a moment when I thought of the clip and that haunting chorus, even though I hadn’t heard the song since its MTV heyday. It would be another seven years before I saw the song on CD, in the form of an über-expensive UK import double-disc collection of ‘80s modern rock hits. I loved the song, but not for $30.

Fast-forward another three years (1997, for those keeping score at home), and Radiohead’s OK Computer dropped. The album came out in the summer, and while I loved The Bends, I had read the reviews about the new one, and I was damned if I was going to allow my summer to be weighed down by some dark-ass album. So I bought it in the fall…right when they released “Karma Police” as a single. Perfect. Ah, this is good cold-weather music. Hey wait, what’s this? That last bit, where Thom Yorke wails, “For a minute there, I lost myself, I lost myself,” I found myself thinking, “This rings a bell.” Eventually, it hit me; I was playing guitar in my bathroom – it was a small apartment, and I didn’t want to bother anyone, because I suck – and while playing the chords to that last bit in “Karma Police,” I started slowly warbling “I won’t let you down, won’t let you down again…”

Holy shit. A perfect match.

All right, not exactly a perfect match – “Karma Police” is at least a step lower than “I Won’t Let You Down” – but hot damn, were they chord progressions of the same mind, and PhD’s melody fit Radiohead’s music like a glove. Minor, minor, minor…now end MAJOR! Has a mash-up artist stumbled upon this yet? The first one to put them together has an instant cult classic on his hands.

I finally nabbed a copy of the song in 2000 – thank you, Napster – and still play the daylights out of it. I even try to watch the video once a month. (Seriously, is there anything funnier than a guy lighting a bomb that says “BOMB” on it?) There is talk, some 27 years after the band’s first release, of putting the albums back in print via iTunes. While it’s tempting to rail against an indifferent music industry for focusing more on the short-term acts than the long-term, bank account-fattening artists that could have prevented the crisis they currently find themselves in, we will instead simply say thank you. Hopefully that 45MB of disk space will generate enough revenue for them to, oh, I don’t know, make sure no album falls out of print ever again. Just a thought.

Obscure music geek trivia: the drummer for PhD was Simon Phillips. Wow.

PhD – I Won’t Let You Down

The back half of that line is pure cliché, but that is the beauty of a good melody; you can sing any old dumb, tired expression and get away with it, as long as you say it the right way.

Indeed, it was downright ballsy of Keane – this might be the first time anyone has ever used ‘Keane’ and ‘ballsy’ in the same sentence, so let’s pause for a second and savor the moment – to open their 2006 album Under the Iron Sea with “Atlantic.” Yes, their 2004 debut Hopes and Fears played many of the same cards that Iron Sea does in terms of overwrought sentimentality, but there isn’t a single song on Hopes and Fears as naked or as vulnerable – not to mention downright odd – as “Atlantic,” and to open your sophomore album with a song like this is to risk career suicide. Of course, it only made me like them more.

Hopes and Fears was about bending but not breaking, the places only we know, and how your ex has no time for you now; it sure as hell wasn’t about the fear of dying alone. They showed glimpses of a darker side on the album’s last two songs, “Untitled I” (“You’re not the one I hoped for / I’ll see you on the other side”) and the brilliant “Bedshaped” (“Don’t laugh at me, don’t look away / You’ll follow me back with the sun in your eyes / And on your own”), but “Atlantic” takes an inter-dimensional leap from those songs. “I hope all my days will be lit by your face,” singer Tom Chaplin confesses, but Chaplin’s delivery of those words betrays the sentiment. This isn’t a love song; it’s the prayer of a groveling man. “I doooooon’t wanna be old, and feel afraid…”

And just then, just past the 2:30 mark, the clouds break, and the song sees its first major chord. The storm is over, and while the singer hasn’t escaped his dilemma, he at least begins to think in more positive terms: “I need a place that’s hidden in the deep / Where lonely angels sing you to your sleep / Though all the world is broken.” And, as one final gesture to show that Keane was trying to expand their sound as much as a keys/vox/drums band can, Chaplin’s last note is a half-step underneath the key. “The day is beginning,” he says, and you’re just waiting for him to climb up to the base note in the chord — but he never does. It’s a small thing, but I eat that stuff up.

Embedding is disabled, but there is a video for “Atlantic” (including an extended version of the song, to boot) that is just as dark as the first half of the song. Get ur mope on.

Keane – Atlantic

Now, I loved “Save a Prayer” as much as the next teenage girl, but when it came to Duran ballads, my heart lay with “The Chauffeur.” As pretty as “Prayer” is, the lyric never really meant anything to me (yes, I know that Simon’s lyrics didn’t really mean much to anyone). I was too young to call one-night stands paradise, and there was no reason for anyone to say or save a prayer for me.

Maybe the problem was that I just hadn’t heard the right arrangement of it yet.

In 1992, Steve Anderson, the Brothers in Rhythm member who made an earlier appearance in my White Label column on the Human League’s “Love Action,” assembled the most beautiful, absolutely fucking brilliant mix of a track I have heard before or since. Dubbed the “Thunder in Our Hearts” mix –- he samples Kate Bush in the intro, but not, strangely enough, “Running Up That Hill,” the song that features those words –- Anderson strips out the drum and bass tracks, replacing them with tasteful, electronic versions of each. Most of Nick Rhodes’ keyboard tracks are scrapped too, in favor of strings and piano. But it’s not just the new additions that make this mix so good; it’s Anderson’s arrangements and breakdowns that make the re-instrumentation so effective.

There really isn’t anything else to say. If you didn’t care for the original song, this might change your tune. If you are a fan of the song, prepare to be mindblown.

Duran Duran – Save a Prayer (DMC Thunder in Our Hearts Mix)

I can’t say I blame her, really. Not because the song is bad or anything – au contraire, the song is all kinds of awesome – but because she knew what I knew, but what neither of us wanted to admit: we just didn’t belong together. And this song summed up our relationship in 17 words, though it would be another four and a half years before we accepted it:

There are things I want to do
But I don’t know if they will be with you

That’s the genius of Teenage Fanclub’s Bandwagonesque: it’s staggeringly economical. The lyrics to “What You Do to Me” are 20 — count ‘em! — 20 words long. The chorus to “The Concept” is “I didn’t want to hurt you / Oooooooh yeaaaaaah.” But nothing from the album pierced me like those first two lines from “Alcoholiday,” because there were things I wanted to do someday – get married, have kids – but I always questioned whether she would be the one that I’d do them with. I now realize, of course, that if you’re not sure if you want to marry someone, it’s a sure sign that you don’t – and shouldn’t – marry them.

But man, did I love her. With everything I had. It just wasn’t enough. Her parents and friends didn’t like me, my family and friends didn’t like her, and our relationship with each other was what Matt Groening once described as Cobra & Mongoose. Nothing was going to hold this one together. That is perhaps the toughest lesson I have ever learned, that sometimes love isn’t enough. I was such a naïve romantic that I truly believed that love could conquer all. Fool. “Baby, I’ve been fucked already,” indeed.

Teenage Fanclub – Alcoholiday