MUSIC: "Oceanographer's Choice," the Mountain Goats
I've got you, you've got whatever's left of me to get.
Our conversations are like minefields - no one's found a safe way through one yet.
I'll spend a lot of money, I'll buy you white gold, we'll raise up a litte roof against the cold on Southwood Plantation Road
Where at night the stars blow like milk across the sky, where the high wires drop, where the fat crows cry.
All night long you giggle and scream, your brown eyes deeper than a dream.
We are gonna get through this, we are gonna stay married in this house like a Louisiana graveyard where nothing stays buried...
Besides the Cheating Song, there are a thousand other micro-genres: Songs About Cheating Songs ("Red Red Wine and Cheating Songs"), Songs About Being Invited to Your Ex's Wedding ("Invitation to Cry," "I Knew the Bride When She Used to Rock and Roll"), I-Really-Shouldn't-Have-Broken-Up-With-Him/Her Songs ("I Cried All the Way to the Altar"), etc. My favorite of these is the George and Martha. Almost makes you worry that I aspire to be unhappily married.
Tallahassee is a concept album about a couple that Edward Albee wishes he could have come up with. "I hope when you think of me years down the line you can't find one good thing to say/And I hope that if I found the strength to walk out you'd stay the hell out of my way." Yikes.
For a long time I was happy to use the album only to amplify my own desperation, but when I started looking for a moral to the story, I came up with this: sometimes letting go is the way to end a relationship, but sometimes it's the only way to fix it.
P.S. Try using "the crumbling marriage" as a metaphor for any tradition that someone doesn't want to be a part of anymore but can't quite bring himself to renounce (i.e. lapsed Catholics, expatriated Americans). See?
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