For most people, Valentine’s Day blows. Whether you’re single and feeling left out of all the fuchsia-colored hoopla or attached and feeling let down by a thoughtless lover, it can be a day that draws out insecurities and exposes old wounds. (Don’t get us wrong, you could get lucky and have a ball instead!) But in the event that you’re feeling blue on this most romantic of holidays, let us suggest that you savor some simple pleasures: Draw a bath and put on one of these classic break-up albums. They feel your pain.
Beck
Sea Change
For 2002’s Sea Change, Beck ditched the wisecracking wordplay and electronic flourishes that had powered much of his career. This go ’round, he wasn’t in the mood to play; a recent break-up with his girlfriend of almost a decade, fashion designer Leigh Limon, had left this perpetual experimenter down and out. What’s a guy to do? Beck turned to a twangy guitar and crafted his most personal and best album to date — the gorgeous and instantly classic Sea Change. Make no bones about it, Beck was in full-on mourning. In “The Golden Age” he admits, “These days I barely get by / I don’t even try.” Shortly after the album’s release, Blender magazine asked Beck if it had been written before or after his separation from Limon. Beck told the reporter, “Er, a little before … after, but before. I don’t know. [Sarcastically] I’ll send you the dates. I have them written down on my calendar at home.” Sometimes the sorest subjects just happen to make the best albums.
Bob Dylan
Blood on the Tracks
Perhaps it helps to remember that no matter how lovesick you may feel, you can’t possibly feel as wretched as Bob Dylan evidently did when he wrote Blood on the Tracks. After all, the poor guy was left to croon, “I’m going out of my mind / With a pain that stops and starts/ Like a corkscrew to my heart / Ever since we’ve been apart.” Dylan released the solemn Blood on the Tracks in 1975, right around the time that he and Sara Dylan, his wife of 12 years, initially separated. Though the folk singer has denied that the Blood on the Tracks songs were written about his wife, the youngest of the couple’s four children — son Jakob Dylan — told one of his father’s biographers: “The songs are my parents talking.” Treasured by both fans and critics as one of Dylan’s finest works, the disc includes heart-wrenching favorites “Simple Twist of Fate,” “Tangled Up in Blue” and “You’re a Big Girl Now,” but just about every one of the album’s 10 songs is regarded as a classic.
Fleetwood Mac
Rumours
For Fleetwood Mac, interpersonal turmoil equaled creative genius. During the 1976 recording of its best-loved album, Rumours, in Sausalito, California, two couples within the band were at odds: Christine McVie and John McVie had just divorced, and Lindsey Buckingham and Stevie Nicks had also just called things off. To further ratchet up the tension, Nicks had taken up with Mick Fleetwood. Despite the fact that band members frequently weren’t on speaking terms and were spending late nights feeding their cocaine habits, each of them had a hand in writing now-iconic songs like “Go Your Own Way,” “Second Hand News” and “The Chain.” By far the least depressing-sounding album on this list, Rumours paired mostly upbeat rhythms with lyrics resigned to the natural course of a relationship gone sour. Witness the opening lines to “Dreams”: “You say you want your freedom / Well who am I to keep you down / It’s only right that you should / Play the way you feel it.”
Marvin Gaye
Here, My Dear
In 1975, Marvin Gaye’s first wife Anna Gordy filed for divorce from the singer, following brazen infidelity that included Gaye’s fathering two children with another woman during the couple’s marriage. Because Gaye’s extravagant spending habits had left him strapped for cash, his lawyer hatched a plan to allocate half the royalties from his next album toward child support and alimony for Gordy. Gaye agreed and set out to work on Here, My Dear. He originally planned to make a bad album to spite Gordy, but once he got to ruminating on his relationship with her, some of the best stuff of his career surfaced. In chronological order, the album travels through the couple’s relationship — the good times and the bad — with plainspoken tenderness and anger. The very first track exemplifies this disparity in feelings, with Gaye saying “You didn’t have the right to use the son of mine to keep me in line” and then “May you always think of me the way I was / I was your baby.”
Liz Phair
Exile in Guyville
Liz Phair has said that her 1993 debut Exile in Guyville is a song-by-song response to the Rolling Stones’ 1972 Exile on Main Street. The concept was an interesting one, but not particularly evident in the finished product. Besides, Phair’s songs were spectacular enough on their own. In turns snotty and angry, insecure and raw, the lyrics for the Exile songs were at home in the angsty ’90s and they introduced a new breed of female singer. This singer evidently wasn’t too pleased with the way things had turned out for her and was spelling it out for all to hear. In the devastating “Divorce Song,” Phair deadpans, “The license said you had to stick around until I was dead / But if you’re tired of looking at my face, I guess I already am.” The album turned out to be Phair’s best by far, as the Aughts would see her succumb to pop sensibilities and sleazy Stuff magazine photo shoots. Of note, a 15th Anniversary Reissue of Exile in Guyville was released in ’08 and it included three new songs from the original recording sessions.