Listing dangerously

Berlin was awesome. Awesome awesome awesome. I feel like a new woman and my SAD is fought right back. Nonetheless I have no time this morning to tell you about how great everything is, so let's go on with the list of most weepable songs ever:

6. 'Lover, You Should’ve Come Over', Jeff Buckley. I think Jeff Buckley woke up one morning and decided to write a song that would make girls emotional, sort of like a cat that wakes up and decides it’s the day it waits by a mousehole until it catches a mouse. Well, consider me caught. There’s a demanding urgency in the high wailing and the ‘say it’s not too late’ that Jeff Buckley makes sound universal, as well as like a particularly artful orgasm.

7. 'Laisse aboyer les chiens', Benjamin Biolay This song showcases all the weaknesses of his weak voice, but in context. Theatrical lyrics about female opacity in the face of a man’s despairing love (“You’ve cut me by the roots, I’m pale like a bag of heroin, my angel, etc.”) that make you understand, perhaps by virtue of the cracking, unbeautiful voice that sings them or of the melancholy, beautiful backing instrumentation, that his heart really is irretrievably broken, and now he’s going to fucking kill you. Somehow that's sad instead of infuriating.

8. 'Little Darlin’', Benjamin Biolay. Gone on about it before. More cracking, unbeautiful Biolay-voice, complimented by samples of what’s lovely and melancholy about the Carter Family – he’s a genius for having found it. He found what’s melancholy and beautiful about Marylin Monroe’s voice for a track on Rose Kennedy, 'Les Cerfs-Volants', but I prefer this.

9. 'Crown of Love', Arcade Fire. Maybe our romantic lives get higher stakes as we age, but I know for a fact I shed more tears over one boy when I was 14 than I’ve shed over all the boys put together since. One would rather like to bookend and forget such a shitty, stupid, honest time, but this moaning, soaring, violining protest against one’s own obsession, taciturnity and incoherence is an effectively shmaltzy reminder emotional waltzes aren’t just for teenagers.

10. 'Homesick', the Cure. Speaking of, I owe it to my 14 year old self to have at least one Cure song on the list. I’ve never found the Cure depressing and in fact now I find it almost provokingly, vacuously cheerful. But there’s always this song and most of the Disintegration album to remind me why I spent those years in black. This pretty-little-wrist-slitting-ditty moans out everything about wanting to go home but knowing home’s not really there anymore, not how you’re wanting it anyways. I wonder what I thought it meant when I was 14.