No Backup Plan 2 comments

By Andy Whitman

They arrive for regularly scheduled appointments and they arrive, distraught and hopeless, in the middle of the night, with no appointment at all. But their stories are remarkably the same. He’s a self-absorbed jerk. She’s aloof and distant, and she checked out emotionally a long time ago.

My wife and I hear these stories on a fairly routine basis because we want to play a small role in restoring broken marriages. My only qualification for the job is that I am a self-absorbed jerk who keeps repenting of his idiocy. My wife is a counselor. Together we’ve muddled through 27 years of marriage. Maybe we have something to offer the desperate people who pass through our front door. I hope so.

Perhaps because of that rather esoteric interest, I have a particular fondness for divorce albums. It’s admittedly an odd preoccupation, and in truth “fondness” doesn’t really describe my reaction. As Bob Dylan once responded to an interviewer who commended him on his divorce album Blood on the Tracks, “A lot of people tell me they enjoy that album. It's hard for me to relate to that. I mean, people enjoying the type of pain, you know?"

Yeah, I know, Bob. So let me note that my fondness is tempered by the realization that divorce is devastating, and that real individuals and families are ripped apart.

Nevertheless, divorce has sometimes led to popular songs of the highest order, and as a music fan I can find much to admire in this most desperate of musical genres. Of course, breakup songs have been a staple of popular music forever, and most of them are trite and inconsequential. But occasionally someone gets it exactly right. The songs ring true in ways that have nothing to do with the hypothetical or the commercial, and that can only be based on real life: Bob Dylan imagining his ex-wife in bed with someone else in “You’re a Big Girl Now” and howling as only Bob Dylan can howl; Van Morrison, emotionally undone, staying up all night in a lonely diner in “Snow in San Anselmo”; Bruce Cockburn teetering between hate and his better Christian impulses in “You Get Bigger as You Go”; Richard Thompson uncorking a guitar solo in “Shoot Out the Lights” that is so full of rage and sorrow that it is breathtaking in its intensity.

I wouldn’t wish that kind of pain on my worst enemy. And I’m so glad it’s been captured on magnetic media. These are the songs that perfectly encapsulate the messy ambivalence that accompanies the hypercharged days at the end of love; the anger and self-loathing and sense of relief that seem to co-exist, impossibly, in the same human beings. They are marvelous works of art.

Most recently I’ve heard that spark in two albums that could not be more sonically different. Jacob Golden’s Revenge Songs is a fey, resigned, folkie exploration of what happens when a relationship that started out very good ends very badly. The Mendoza Line’s Thirty Year Low is a blunt, no-holds-barred exchange between husband Timothy Bracy and spurned wife Shannon McCardle, full of fiery sentiments and equally fiery rock ‘n roll. There’s the unmistakable whiff of real life about both albums.

The Mendoza Line’s album is split equally between Bracy’s and McCardle’s songs. Where they collaborated on previous albums, Thirty Year Low finds them writing separately, and, indeed, living separately. Bracy tries the conciliatory approach of the sensitive artist, remorseful and apologetic, but McCardle will have none of it:

Come on over honey
Grab your pens and get your shit
She's drawin' blueprints, layin' marble,
Built a shrine around your dick

Hell hath no fury. That’s the kind of songwriting that will keep you off AM radio, but McCardle isn’t particularly looking for a hit. She’s looking to hit back. Bracy’s songs are the more aesthetically refined, but there’s something to be said for straightforward communication. Don’t look for a reunion tour anytime soon.

Jacob Golden’s songs, in contrast, are more studied and poetic. He’s in the distinguished line of anguished navel gazers that includes Jackson Browne and Joni Mitchell. He offers the usual mopery that characterizes thousands of “my baby left me” songs, but he also pens lines of clear-eyed introspection that place him well ahead of the melancholy pack. Look at the way he cuts through the rationalizations and lays out the cold, hard realities:

I never said I had any answers
I never claimed to be the better man
I’ve got no integrity to cling to
I don’t have a backup plan

Those are words that my wife and I hear all too frequently, usually without musical accompaniment. I’m always grateful when I hear them. The honesty means that there is a chance, a place for grace to shine through the spidering cracks of a formerly ordered life. They are infinitely sad words, and perhaps the precursor to a better future.

Another distraught couple passes through the door, and we begin the long, arduous process of sharing the hope of recovering what has been lost.