David Medsker takes us on a mad, dark journey into a land most of us are probably familiar with — the Land of the Co-Dependent Relationship That Will Not Die, No Matter How Much Each Participant Believes It Should, And Hangs On Probably By The Force Of Sheer Utter Convenience. But in doing so, he teaches us valuable lessons: 1. No one can make you feel inferior without your consent and 2. You should always pay bands royalties if you feel as though you’re sort of copying their stuff. Both important lessons for this Valentine’s season.

“Go, Tribe! Or: The Milk Is Never, Ever Fresh”
By David Medsker

My breakup song story has one hell of a pregnant pause; it actually takes place nearly five years after the final breakup with the lass in question. I say final breakup because this was one of those multiple-breakup relationships. You know the kind, the one that Larry Miller brilliantly lampooned by pretending to open a refrigerator and saying, “This milk is sour! Maybe tomorrow it’ll be fresh,” and putting the milk back in the fridge. If you’re in one of those right now, end it. The milk is never, ever fresh.

The relationship, in total, lasted a little more than six years, and even as I was breaking up with her, I still loved her. But it was abundantly clear to me that things would never work out – she still hadn’t told her mother that I had moved to Chicago to be with her, which I had done a year and a half earlier – so I put head before heart and pulled the plug. I even went so far as to utter words that St. Peter will surely repeat back to me on my day of judgment: “I still love you…but I don’t like you very much.” I’m a bastard, it’s true. (more…)

Timing, the New Testament tells us, is everything, and it takes a startlingly few number of works to turn a glorious, magnificent, rainbows-and-puppies kind of day into one of hideous terror, especially when that day is being sonically overseen by a guy in a pair of oversized fly sunglasses.

“Woman Needs A Man Like A Fish Needs A Bicycle”
By Scott Malchus

My final year of college, 1992, I directed a senior film that featured my girlfriend in one of the starring roles. At the time, U2’s Achtung Baby was gaining momentum, and every college and mainstream radio station was playing tracks from the album. The making of the movie was stressful and quite a learning experience. The movie was finally completed in April, and I held a big premiere at the university; my parents, sisters, family friends, and members of faculty all attended. After the screening, which went very well, I was on cloud nine. The culmination of four years of hard work seemed to pay off and, more importantly, the audience really liked the movie. The cast, crew, friends and my family all returned to the duplex I rented with my three best friends in college. Can you imagine how great I felt? I didn’t need any alcohol to get me high that night. Then, just as things were winding down, my girlfriend took me downstairs to my bedroom so we could talk.

That’s right, she broke up with me right then and there. Couldn’t wait another 12 hours to let me savor the moment. It had to be then.

Like I said, Achtung Baby was in every one’s tape deck or CD player, mine included. I gravitated to the darker songs, the one’s about deteriorating relationships and betrayal. I cannot listen to “So Cruel” (download) without thinking of the best and worst day of my college years.

(Luckily for me, I would meet my bride-to-be a couple of months later.)

We’ve been having a lot of fun here at Songs for the Dumped, but let us not forget that these are stories of heartache, woe, ache and heartwoe, and that most of this good-hearted ironic nostalgia is probably just an attempt to mask several years’ worth of bitter, bitter pain. Thankfully, like Charlie Brown did with Christmas, our own Taylor Long can tell us what Valentine’s Day really is about. Lights, please?

“Sing When You’re Losing”
By Taylor Long

I’ve been officially dumped once. There’s no reason to brag behind it, I just tend to avoid relationships altogether, so I’ve been minorly dumped a ton, but really, truly dumped once.

It was the middle of my senior year of college and I’d been dating a guy, Kevin, long-distance for about six months. It had been clear for awhile that things were just too difficult, for a lot of reasons, not the least of which was his being in San Diego and wanting to move to Seattle, and my being in New York and wanting to stay in New York.

He came to Seattle to visit me after Christmas, but my mother had just undergone a huge surgery, so I was an emotional mess, and because of that instead of doing the smart thing and talking about our problems, I decided the best thing to do was avoid talking about them completely in hopes that we would just forget them (ha!), and have a good trip. Unsurprisingly, that didn’t happen. We fought a lot, and it was a very upsetting, miserable time for me, for both of us. (more…)

The great thing about breakup songs is that you have absolutely no control over what they are; they just happen to be playing in the background, clamped into the CD player or turntable by some tinpot DJ who has no idea the sheer level of emotional damage you’re either enduring or creating. Sometimes this random process creates entertaining non sequiturs; sometimes it creates a moment so jarring that even Patrick Swayze couldn’t make it more awkward.

“Nobody Puts Dunphy in a Corner”
By Dw. Dunphy

The fact is that very often the song you recall has nothing to do with being dumped. It just becomes the soundtrack by happenstance.

So we’re taking this back all the way to 1988, the year I graduated high school. I was nuts for Kim, but in all honesty, my confidence level was bottomed out and I didn’t step up as well as I could have… I see a lot of my inclinations in women embodied in her: big hair, seven or so shirts on all at the same time and linebacker shoulderpads, an unhealthy obsession with Dirty Dancing — but, again, it was 1988. So when she told me things were not so fantastic in her life and she didn’t want to go to the prom with me, I didn’t understand, yet said I did.

“S’cool,” I imagine I replied. No, things were not “s’cool,” and that was it for me and Kim.

Fittingly, the song that totally emasculated me was her favorite — the completely inescapable “(I’ve Had) The Time Of My Life” (download) from the Dirty Dancing soundtrack.

A lot of people are going to tell you that adolescent regression is an unhealthy thing, but few among us are the people who, if given the chance, wouldn’t jump at the opportunity to try to address some long-dormant crush from the high school or college days, even if said person is more than a little bit nuts. Zack Dennis goes back to school, and ends up getting an important lesson from Professor Black Rebel Motorcycle Club.

“Mercy Mercy Me”
By Zack Dennis

When I came back from my adventures in South Africa, I was truly living the dream. I was twenty-nine, unemployed, and living in the spare room of my father’s house in Arlington. My days consisted of applying for jobs I was hoping I wouldn’t be offered, lifting weights, and hanging around at tennis courts practicing my serve. My nights consisted of drinking bourbon and staying up late watching Futurama reruns on Adult Swim. J_____, reeling from a failed relationship in Atlanta, had come home and was living in a similar situation. She and I had been friends since freshman year in college; I’d been chasing her since a makeout session in the blue glow of a television that had just finished showing 9½ Weeks. After deftly deflecting my advances for the next ten years, she finally consented, and we spent the summer of 2005 together. Our relationship was an exercise in adolescent regression; it primarily consisted of a series of late-afternoon trysts before our parents came home, but through the course of it I fell for her, hard. At the end of the summer I moved to Los Angeles for a new job, foolishly hoping she’d follow me. We managed to limp along until January before she broke things off, and I was devastated.

I’d heard of Black Rebel Motorcycle Club through J_____, and while making a belated Valentine’s CD for her I encountered their song “Mercy” (download) from the acoustic Howl Sessions. There’s a lot in the lyrics that reminds me of her, though I should make it clear that she’s not the type of person that the song is about. But something about it really captured my mood, and the conflict in my head at the time. I was searching desperately and angrily to find fault with her so the blow would be softened, but it was virtually impossible for me to do so because I still loved her. I really felt like a man who had been left with nothing. Even then, I knew that it was completely unfair to blame J_____ for breaking my heart. After all, *I* was the one who had left. But I’d never been hurt this bad before (it took me a good solid year to recover) and for the first time in my life, I honestly knew what the word “heartache” meant.

In most cases, a breakup song is whatever happens to be playing in the background, but on rare, special occasions, it’s as though the DJ has temporarily set up shop inside your brain, ready to accent your worst moments with even worse music. Jon Cummings gets all AC on you in the winter of 1981.

“This Story Features Long Bus Rides With Cheerleaders”
By Jon Cummings

When I was in high school, I had an annoying tendency to develop head-over-heels crushes on girls who were either way out of my league or were inappropriate for other reasons (immature, insane, gay, etc. — sometimes more than one of those at the same time). I was a sportswriter in those days, covering my high school’s football and basketball games for the local paper, so I spent a lot of time on long bus rides with cheerleaders — and would occasionally mistake their friendliness for something else. To make matters worse, the girl I was REALLY in love with, a cheerleader herself, was off limits because she had a jock boyfriend. So instead of letting myself really fall for her, I would engage her in drawn-out heart-to-hearts about whichever other girl I was crushing on.

During the winter of ‘81 I fell hard for a particular girl — we’ll call her E—-. She was red-haired, freckled, flawless. I kept my distance for a long time; I wrote songs about her, stalked her at 10 paces in the hallways, and of course mooned over her incessantly with my cheerleader confidant. I finally got up the courage to approach E—- at a postgame dance and pour my heart out. I showed her my songs; I protested my undying love; I even proffered the endorsement of our mutual friend.

Needless to say, I didn’t get the response I was looking for — though E—- was perfectly sweet and sympathetic as she ripped my heart from my chest. She turned to walk away, and just then the DJ began playing “More Than Just the Two of Us” by Sneaker (download), which was a minor hit at that time — and perhaps the most maudlin “please don’t go” song ever written. I watched her go, and as I glanced around the room I saw the cheerleader friend who I really loved, dancing with her boyfriend.

As I stood there alone, watching her dance — and as the suddenly orange-tressed, pock-marked and deeply flawed E—- probably went off to gossip about me with her bitchy friends — the inanity of Sneaker’s lyrics melded with the absurdity of my situation, and I found myself laughing all the way home. I quickly forgot about E—- entirely, and moved on to my next serial crush.

(Of course, I never got anywhere with my cheerleader friend, either, but that’s another story.)

Everything is worse in high school: your hair, your taste in music, your grasp of how bad you have it, your ability to have a meaningful conversation with a girl that does not revolve around how awesome Nine Inch Nails are. But especially worse is your ability to maintain a relationship of any kind, which is why most high school romances end in whatever is the emotional equivalent of watching a bus full of orphan blind baby koalas go over a cliff in a bus on fire. Let’s go back to school now with, uh, me:

“I’m A Cold Heartbreaker Fit To Burn And I’ll Rip Your Heart In Two”
By Jeff Vrabel

In spite of an unfortunate decision by my parents to hold off on getting me braces until late in high school, and a general disposition that led to a running joke involving my similarity to Paul Pfeiffer on The Wonder Years, I actually had a girlfriend for the better part of my senior year, though I had absolutely no idea what was going on most of the time, and was, as I recall, so deliriously happy that someone was paying attention to me that I implicitly, and gleefully, consented to dating a girl who was pretty regularly flirting heavily with several dozen other dudes at any given time of day, especially Gabe, the new trenchcoat-wearing long-haired tortured poet-type who could draw really well, was a good listener and liked the Smiths. Fucker. (more…)

The poet Emily Dickinson once wrote that “Valentine’s Day sucks rocks,” and it’s easy to see why: Dickinson was known for her use of filthy geological metaphor, as well as for totally hating romance — she was singularly invested in writing about the matters that truly interested her, specifically death, immortality, quail hunting, tattoos and her beloved Georgia Bulldogs.

We here at Popdose agree with E-Dick: Valentine’s Day is one of our nation’s stupidest holidays, right behind Law Day (May 1, look it up, Wikipedia doesn’t lie), National Freedom Day (Feb. 1, like all the other days we’re like, “Dammit”) and Thanksgiving. Even on your best days, on your most goopy-eyed, slow-motion-walks-on-the-beach days, you’re-not-annoyed-by-the-other-person’s-insignificant-faults-yet days, Valentine’s Day is no good: you get, like, two good ones before it comes less about, “How best can I giveth my heart to my ain true love?” and more about, “Christ, I need something chocolate, is Walgreens open at 3 a.m.?”

But it’s double-secret stupid for anyone who works anywhere remotely near the publishing industry, or anywhere where some pinheaded editor can go, “So, do we have any ideas for Valentine’s Day this year?” So this year, we here at Popdose came up with an idea, and it’s a good one: Seeing as how it’s nearly Valentine’s Day, and seeing as how Valentine’s Day sucks rocks, and seeing as how most of you readers are thinking just shut up and give us the free MP3s already, we’d like to present Songs for the Dumped, a two-week anthology in which music nerds write about tracks they’ve attached to a particular crippling breakup, let you splash around in the stories behind them and hopefully, if we’ve done our jobs, make you feel slightly better about your own miserable romantic history by allowing you to compare it favorably to ours. (Or, as the highly talented David Medsker wrote me last week: “Did you like how we all just bore our souls at the drop of a hat?”)

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