{"id":6064,"date":"2016-11-14T09:07:44","date_gmt":"2016-11-14T13:07:44","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/u-town.com\/collins\/?p=6064"},"modified":"2016-11-14T09:07:44","modified_gmt":"2016-11-14T13:07:44","slug":"divorce","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/u-town.com\/collins\/?p=6064","title":{"rendered":"divorce"},"content":{"rendered":"

I’ve been thinking about divorce. Not for myself, since I’m not married. I’ve been thinking about how it’s something that I don’t think anybody can completely “get” (or convey) unless they’ve actually been through it.<\/p>\n

It’s not just a particularly intense romantic breakup, any more than a marriage is a particularly intense romance. It’s a difference in kind, not just in amount.<\/p>\n

My favorite divorce songs, as it happens, were all written by people who had actually been divorced.<\/p>\n

The first is “Till Death Do We Part<\/a>” by Madonna — one of the few songs of hers that I’ve ever really liked. (I’m just linking so as not to have too many embedded videos.)<\/p>\n

(From a songwriting point of view, I especially like how it goes into third person for the bridges, but obviously can’t stay there for long — we can achieve objectivity at times like that, but only for a while. The third person lines may also be an echo of the tabloid stories about her marriage to Sean Penn. A weakness is that she obviously figured out how effective it is when she speaks the line (with a complete lack of affect), “He’s not in love with her anymore.” And it is effective — very powerful, in fact — but she tries to go back to that well too many times. Less is more.)<\/p>\n

Then, pretty much without flaw, there’s Sin\u00e9ad O’Connor’s “The Last Day of Our Acquaintance.”<\/p>\n