3 of the Best Songs About Breaking Up

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Breaking up is pretty painful but music which captures the reality...the dissapointment of relationships falling apart has always interested me. Here's five songs that strongly chronicle the pain of broken love in order:


9 Crimes - Damien Rice



Not truly a break up song but one that literallly spells out the internal process that leads one to cheat on someone they claim to love. Imagine waking up in a dark hotel room in vegas at 1am a night ready to go down to the bar because there's problems in your relationship and you just want to feel something with someone else and you're haunted by the words "it's the wrong kind of place to be cheating on you/ it's the wrong time but she's pulling me through" The horror of a love going so wrong you're want to be the source of someone's pain and someone's love expresses the complicated feelings one feels at the time of a break up.


Blindsided - Bon Iver



The more classic apporach to writing about breakups. Blindsided is more than a cute song to play when it's snowing outside. Justin Vernon's ghostly voice sings I'm crippled and slow/ For the agony
I'd rather know/ 'Cause blinded I am blindsided." Like most of his songs it's up for interpretation but it does express the most painful factor in why being dumped can hurt--you weren't expecting it. To feel blindsided by a lover who seemed to feel the way you feel is a hard thing to recover from and is often more painful than the having to move on itself. Being betrayed makes you feel crippled and a slow for a lot longer while than if you had been the one to do the dumping.


Happy Ending - Mika



The Champion of this list. "Happy Ending" does nothing except talk about break ups and it does so with strong sad emotional lyrics which contrasts the choir-like pep of the music. From the moment you play the song "This is the way you left me/ I'm not pretending/ No hope, no, no glory, no Happy Ending" you find yourself being grabbed by a gentle sweet voice that seems to understand and put music to the tears that fall down the first second you hear that the person you love no longer wants you at all. It stops itself from going into the paranoia of was there someone else and instead focuses on love lost and the idea of acceptance of what can only be felt alongside a lot of pain. It's a catharsis that comes as a surprise from music which borders on very corny and yet even if you are turned off by the melody itself, the lyrics are universal to anyone who's been dumped and had a hard time accepting that it actually happened. Finally, the title itself is a huge misnomer which also parralls the desire to seem happy and hopeful when inside you feel depressed and ashamed.

3 of the Best Songs About Breaking Up
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