Valentine's morning-after songs

Looking wistfully, askance, and loopily on love

I’m writing you on Valentine’s Day evening, alone with a glass of wine. Having lived mostly on the uncoupled side of the tracks for awhile, Feb. 14 tends to be a quiet occasion. Often contemplative, occasionally rueful, sometimes just another day. Tonight I ordered Chinese food, the old fake kind with sweet-and-sour chicken balls and chow mein and egg rolls, for a kitschy little date night with myself.

I thought of calling someone up, like maybe you. But I decided just to send you a note in the morning.

My old stamping grounds The Globe and Mail ran a reader poll this week on the Greatest Love Songs and proclaimed Elvis’s “Can’t Help Falling in Love” the winner, nudging out Neil Young’s “Harvest Moon.” Not terrible choices. But I tend to fall harder for the less straightforward propositions, in life as in song.

I was reminded of three such songs in the past couple of days. I’ll share them to help you nurse your own love hangovers, be they from celebration, drinking to forget, or doing your sober best to bypass the whole mess.

Martha Wainwright, ‘Don’t Forget’

Montreal’s Martha Wainwright (who recently lost her aunt Jane McGarrigle, with all our sympathies) is preparing to head out on a tour marking the 20th anniversary of, as her site puts it, her “seminal eponymous debut studio album.” The guarded wording is because before that “official” record in 2005, Wainwright spent a decade or so making her own cassettes and CDs to hawk at gigs. Now she’s reissued two of those to streaming for the first time, the 1997 tape Ground Floor and the 1999 EP 6 Songs.

“Don’t Forget” is the only song that’s on both of those releases and then again on the seminal eponymous debut studio album. I hope you’ll see why she kept putting it forward. It felt classic to me the first time I heard it, live at her and Rufus’s long-gone Montreal haunt Café Sarajevo. Someone should have picked it up the way Linda Ronstadt did with Martha’s aunt Anna’s masterpiece “Heart Like a Wheel”—the two songs are somewhat similar, each about the way love goes round, rises and falls. But Martha’s is not as sad.

“Don’t Forget” is about the kind of young-adult love where friendship and eros are all confounded, and the relationship never fully takes form before you lose hold of it. Perhaps you were too busy romanticizing its future to figure out its present: “In my silly mind I’ve gotten married to you/ You’re across town, don’t even have a clue/ Or these images that in ten years/ I’ll run into you and fall right back inside of you” … “on a platform track,” “in an old movie.”

It’s one of the more extravagantly wistful songs I can think of. But it embraces something wider as the interiority of the verses gives way to a musically and lyrically cyclical refrain, as big as all outdoors: “The fall it cools, and the winter it snows/ Spring it rains, summer comes and you go.” The inevitability removes all judgment; love and loss are only part of nature and time. No blame. Just please don’t forget.

Yes, there’s a person the song is tied to in my mind. But as the years pass, it’s expanded to take in each and every hand that ever slipped from mine. And especially those who somehow made their way back like the sun.

At least tonight on this fake holiday, I’m liking the raw, early version best, the sound of the Plateau and Mile End in the late 1990s. Pas de circulaires, SVP.

The Mountain Goats, ‘Soft Targets’

Now we need a countercharm to the love spell. Because sometimes love doesn’t just stink—it can be hazardous, even lethal. That’s the purview of the Mountain Goats’ Alpha Couple series. The song cycle about a doomed codependent relationship threaded its way through John Darnielle’s 1990s albums and tapes to culminate in 2002’s Tallahassee, the album from which you probably at least know “No Children.”

“Soft Targets” is an outlier on that orbit, released on an obscure seven-inch split with John Vanderslice in 2003. But it’s like a poison distillation of the whole Alpha sequence.

Its hook is just a C-chord-form sliding dissonantly up the guitar neck. It pictures the ruined pair crawling to each other across broken plates on the kitchen floor, “emissaries from neighbouring lands.” The monsters in their psyches, the monsters they are together, drain both their life forces. Worst of all, there’s a baby in the house.

There is a wistfulness here too, even a warmth. The thing is, they do love each other. It just isn’t going to do them any good.

If you’ve never metaphorically been there, well, I’m glad for you. But I’m not sure I quite understand you.

I do relish the stark original. But in the names of mercy and sound quality, here is the version from the band’s 2021 “Jordan Lake Sessions,” where Matt Douglas’s tenor sax offers some respite between verses.

Polmo Polpo, ‘Kiss Me Again and Again’

So we’ve had the sweet and the sour, and now it’s time for a palette cleanser. For sounds that transcend human emotion and physicality, and transport us to that intangible heavyside layer. Forget mere romance, mere eros, what about that universal love, that agape, that benevolent love of all creation from an unselfish soul?

Meaning, of course, disco.

This is another 20th-anniversary project, a digital remaster of a 2005 release by Toronto’s Sandro Perri under his early electronic-music handle Polmo Polpo. It’s a remake of the 1978 classic from the NYC Gallery dance floor, “Kiss Me Again” by Arthur Russell and Nicky Siano, aka Dinosaur (which was also remastered and reissued recently, on vinyl only).

The original is ecstatic and immediate, albeit off-centre. Perri’s version gets there by slower, humbler means, evolving through electro-acoustic textures and samples to grow into a muted-mutated landscape the listener can wander and observe through the course of half an hour. And then perhaps return to begin again, on a slightly different path.

Perri cautions on his Instagram, “With no connection to disco-era life in New York City, let alone the black/latinx/gay club experience, it can hopefully be heard for what it is—an outside perspective on the elusive magic of disco rhythm.” Still, across the range of their musics, I’d say Perri shares much of Russell’s sensibility, in their genre-melding-and-(re)mixing, their penchants for entries and exits at improbable angles, their humour and tenderness.

For licensing reasons, this is a temporary digital-only release. It’s pay-what-you-wish on Bandcamp right now. So give yourself a gift at least as good as a chocolate box and go get it.

It’s been six years since we’ve had an album of new Sandro songs. But he’s played several shows of new ones live at the Tranzac, and I expect it to be one of the albums of the year—hopefully this year—when it comes. Meanwhile, be carried along in these restorative waters, and let the love flow.