Easy Sunday: The music of lost love

"I told myself he isn't really leaving but he left me 

He doesn't love me anymore

Now he's really gone there's nothing left to cling to
I'm all alone with no one to talk to

He left me 

He doesn't love me anymore."

    Skeeter Davis, "He Doesn't love me Anymore," 1967

My guess on Friday was that Elon Musk would cave first, and that turned out to be right. 

Musk deleted the tweets that said that the Epstein tapes would be a bombshell and he is getting word to President Trump that he wants to talk. Trump won't take the call. This is Trump sending a powerful message with action, not words. Republicans see that if you cross him, Trump will make you suffer, no matter how close you were before. 

Remember, Michael Corleone had his brother Fredo shot and killed. 

There were no shortage of song lyrics that I could have selected  to express Elon Musk's feelings. After all, breaking up is hard to do, whichever side of the breakup one is on. The songs in my mind are from that Golden Age of music -- that era of the 1960s and 1970s when I imprinted on popular music. 

"You never call. . . I'll be beside the phone,"

Build me up, Buttercup is too upbeat to use, but I was tempted by the lift-me-up then let-me-down subject matter. Still, I love the melody. So happy and fun.

Critics praise the studio albums, A Tramp Shining, with Jimmy Webb songs and Richard Harris (of all people) singing -- that album with the song MacArthur Park, the one with the sweet green icing dripping off the cake left out in the rain. Critics wrote:

MacArthur Park is about a relationship that was doomed from the start, but that the singer still cannot believe is over. 

That sounds right.

Harris, a great actor but mediocre singer, sounds just the right kind of desperate for Elon Musk, but no one song had the right few lines to use here. So I kept looking.

There were other great potential songs: 

I considered Elvis Presley's "Return to Sender" from 1962, back when people ghosted an ex by returning postal mail. His former sweetheart writes "return to sender, address unknown, no such number, no such zone" on the letters he sends.

The Jackson Five's I Want You Back was a strong candidate, and written in 1969 it was in the sweet spot for me personally. The lyrics also served my purpose:

Oh, baby, give me one more chance (to show you that I love you)
Won't you please let me back in your heart
Oh, darlin', I was blind to let you go (let you go, baby) . . .
Yes, I do now (I want you back)
Ooh, ooh, baby (I want you back)

But, like Buttercup, it is so uptempo that it seemed almost happy. The wrong mood. 

I had always thought that Joni Mitchell's Both Sides Now, was a contemplation of life's complexities and nuances, but in reviewing the lyrics for this post I am reminded that the thing that sets off her revery about life's illusions was lost love, not something more existential. Lost love. Perhaps Musk has come off the ketamine enough to become contemplative and wonder what went wrong.That would have worked to lead off this post, but Mitchell seems moody here, not miserable, so I went with the Skeeter Davis song. Davis sounds as desperate as I suspect Musk feels. 

Readers may have better suggestions, which I might work into a future post, in case the firehose of Trump news ever lets up.

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