The Haute Critique

This week it is going to get a bit heavy, but sometimes heavy is good. To go along with each track, I wrote a short blurb as a companion. When you are ready, press play and read along. Take a break and wait for the song to finish before moving down to the next entry.

The following are true stories. Only the names, places and facts have been changed.

It starts here:

Can I Sleep In Your Arms by Willie Nelson from Red Headed Stranger

A desert canyon. A circling eagle. Willie Nelson spins up on the ipod. I look down and see a breaking news alert.

A murder suicide, the worst of all breakups.

We can’t know what drove them together. She had dropped out of high school and moved to Nashville, home of country music, four years earlier. She moved there to live with her boyfriend, Kieth. Those four years had come crashing down as their relationship fell apart. It wasn’t long before, working as a waitress at Dave and Buster’s, she was swept away by Steve McNair. Vacations, gifts, and even a car.

So why had she left him so cold and alone? Shooting him in his sleep.

At Least That’s What You Said by Wilco from A Ghost Is Born

That night, Steve McNair had spent out with friends. When he arrived at the condo, she was already there. She had left work early.

When I sat down on the bed next to you, you started to cry.
I said,”Maybe if I leave, you’ll want me to come back home.”
“Or maybe all you mean is,’Leave me alone.’”
At least that’s what you said.

You’re irresistible when you get mad.
Isn’t it sad, I’m immune?
I thought it was cute for you to kiss my purple black eye.
Even though I caught it from you, I still think we’re serious.
At least that’s what you said.

Wilco was having problems. There was another drummer, and rumors that Jeff Tweedy, the lead singer, was having clandestine relations. Effectively cheating on Jay Bennet. Things weren’t exactly all flowers and moonbeams between Jay and Jeff. The resulting fights and finally, the breakup were caught on film in the movie I’m Trying to Break Your Heart.

The opening track to the first album after the split is this plaintive song of a love frazzled and maybe already gone.

It was Las Vegas. Steve was going to meet her there. She had suspected he, 36, was already trading her, 20, in for a younger model. It turns out the Escalade, the one she told her friends Steve bought her for her birthday, she was responsible for the payments. She was still making payments on that KIA that no one wanted to buy off her. Her roommate was moving out, so she had to pick up that too. Now this. The Vegas Vacation never happened. She was stood up, alone in Las Vegas.

The guitars sound like a rusty chainsaw cutting through a wedding dress.

He is leaving his wife and four sons. He said they would get married.

At least that’s what he said.

A few days ago she listed her furniture on Craigslist. She bought a gun in the Dave & Buster’s parking lot. Her mind was falling apart. The swell of joy she felt in her chest turned to deep pain. The kind you try to exhale, but for every breath out, you draw one more back in.

Fucking Boyfriend by The Bird & The Bee from The Bird & The Bee

It wasn’t all grim. The pictures of the pair parasailing, creepy age difference aside, look like a smashing time. She told her friends they were in love. Captured and enraptured.

His house was up for sale.

But, he told no one. She was in the wings ready to step on stage with her man. Months had passed and she was still his side thing, and even that was slipping away. Maybe, if they just talked.

She’s Lost Control by Joy Division from Unknown Pleasures

Curtis’s last live performance was on 2 May 1980 at Birmingham University. He was staying at his parents’ house and attempted to talk his wife into staying with him, to no avail. She left him in her house overnight while she left to do some errands.

In the early hours of 18 May 1980, Curtis hanged himself in the kitchen. At the time of his death, he was attempting to balance his musical ambitions with his marriage, which was foundering in the aftermath of his affair with journalist Annik Honoré. His wife found his body the next morning.

Curtis’s memorial stone is inscribed with “Ian Curtis 18 – 5 – 80, Love Will Tear Us Apart”.

We don’t know what was said. Was it over? Was he leaving? However the talk ended, McNair was asleep on the sofa.

Stay Together by Suede from Stay Together[EP]

In February 1994, Suede released “Stay Together”, which became their highest charting single. Released only as an EP, it captures a crystalline moment for the band. The moment when they were at their peak, even though it was already over.

Following the EP, singer Brett Anderson isolated himself and wrote songs for Suede’s next album. During the making of the album, the songs were stretching longer and longer. The band thought it was the result of guitarist Bernard Butler trying to wind the band members up. The tension built until they were unable to record at the same time, each member recording their parts separately. Eyes turned more and more towards Butler. Staying together was an echo from the past.

She took the gun. Next to his sleeping body, she squeezed the trigger. He didn’t wake. He was dead with the first shot. Then a second. Then a third. Then a fourth.

Sitting by his side, she placed the barrel to her temple and pulled one last time. She had hoped to be framed together on the couch forever. As the bullet sealed the scene, her limp body fell from the couch, leaving her laying across her dead lover’s feet, lifeless.

They wouldn’t be discovered for hours.

Through all of the excess and drama, eventually the song swells. It keeps going. Brett starts rambling, Bernard drives madly forward. then a reconciliation happens. Something resembling peace. But it won’t, no, it can’t last.

While recording the follow-up album, Butler took a break to get married. Days after the wedding, he returned to the studio to find he was not being allowed in.

Months earlier, when they recorded Stay Together, they tried harder and harder, It sliped away. More, more, more. As hard as they try they can’t let go and they know they can’t hold on. Bring it back. Horns. Fanfare. Romance. In the end, just a twisted echo of passion escaping this world.

Stay Together would be the last full recording Anderson and Butler would produce as Suede.

Just two months after Steve McNair taped a youth suicide prevention public service announcement, his lover shot and killed him as he slept and then turned the gun on herself.

It was the last act of a life that was beginning to fall apart.

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