It occurred to me today that I’ve got a thing for broken-hearted love songs.

My wife and I were driving in the van the other day, and we were listening to my all-time favorite playlist. I have been working on perfecting it, and all of the songs on it, for about a decade, at least. The playlist is known in our house as the Mega Mix. As we were driving around, listening to the Mega Mix, there was a string of about three or four broken-hearted love songs in a row.

At some point during the parade of these songs, I turned to my wife and said, “I do believe I have a thing for broken-hearted love songs.”

After determining, through a short conversation, that a broken-hearted love song is a love song that tells the story of a love gone bad, we started to try to come up with a list of these songs, especially the ones that would definitely be on my favorite-songs-of-all-time list. Of course, as it was happening, this was easy to start, since we’d been listening to a series of them in the Mega Mix.

When I Was Your Man by Bruno Mars
Every Rose Has Its Thorn by Poison
I’ll Be There For You by Bon Jovi

And then, after these three played, one of my favorite songs of all time played:

At This Moment by Billy Vera and the Beaters

So, from there, we started to try to add songs to the list to fill it out a little bit more. We added these to the list:

When We Were Young by Adele
Whiskey Lullaby by Brad Paisley ft. Alison Krauss
The Dance by Garth Brooks
Ain’t No Sunshine by Bill Withers
Slow Dancing in a Burning Room by John Mayer
Wanted It To Be by Sister Hazel
Purple Rain by Prince
I Will Always Love You by Whitney Houston
Alone by Heart
Yesterday by Boyz II Men

And the list could go on and on. Maybe I should create a separate playlist that is just these broken-hearted love songs?!?!

* * *

I don’t know what it is, exactly, that I love most about a broken-hearted love song, but I do know that part of the formula is the emotion of the singer. For me, the beautiful part of a song is the emotion that it contains, that it is able to convey, that it transfers to the listener. This reminds me of one of my favorite quotes from Robert Frost, one of my favorite poets of all time; he once famously said, “No tears in the writer, no tears in the reader.”

To discuss this concept further, I want to go back to one of my favorite songs of all time, and most definitely my favorite broken-hearted love song –> At This Moment by Billy Vera and the Beaters. If you are unfamiliar with the song, check it out HERE.

Billy Vera, as he is singing this song, seems to me to be dying inside. The way that he wails on the high notes, and the agony that you can hear in his tone, speaks of his desperation and gut-wrenching grief. That kind of sadness, that amazingly heavy sorrow, gains a significance that goes beyond the standard “I’m sad because we broke up” love song.

In fact, look at the list above, or think of your own favorite broken-hearted love song –> doesn’t it express a dejection and a misery that you can just feel, that you can just connect to?

The other part of this, for me, is related to the fact that I’m a vocalist. I just really love singing these songs. They tend to be more vocally-challenging, and you have a greater ability to express yourself while singing a song that has such a large range of emotional variation. You can just really beat your breast with songs like these –> I know that I enjoy singing songs more when they seem to have an appreciable emotional size.

* * *

During this discussion that we had in the van the other day, my wife seemed a little concerned about the fact that I seem to like these broken-hearted love songs so much. In my quickest recovery possible, I told her that I like those the most since I am not likely to ever experience such sadness, since we are so committed to being together permanently. She looked at me with an adoring smile on her face and I knew that I had appeased her curiosity on the subject.

But her question continued to ring on in my head, even after I’d answered it.

My wife and I have a bit of a different romantic history; I am my wife’s first boyfriend, but she is not my first girlfriend. When it comes to how we look at romantic sadness, she and I probably have different perspectives, as far as history goes. While we’ve been together for more than twenty-six years, I do have memories of romantic sadness that would cause me to look at these broken-hearted love songs differently than she would.

Additionally, I think that there’s something more that I appreciate about these songs. Romance starts out, for everyone, without fail, to be largely about dreams; as such, these broken-hearted love songs are also –even in their sadness– about dreams. As sad as the songs are, these relationships weren’t always bad or broken. They were once hopeful and excited about the future. The broken-hearted love song is just the unfortunate finale of what was, most likely, not unlike most other love stories.

Finally, I can honestly say that I was being frank with my wife when I told her that it is really nice to be able to appreciate a broken-hearted love song from the perspective that I am never going to have to feel that way ever again.

That’s all I have to say about that.