14 love songs for loners
Feeling lonely this Valentine's Day? Rather than text your ex, commiserate with these 14 brokenhearted jams!
Moose Blood – “Honey”
That feel when you know it's not going to work, yet you keep trying with the wrong person anyway. Things will get better, you tell yourself. “We are good for each other,” you falsely rationalize to a romantically detached darling, baby, honey. Moose Blood knows the drill. Maybe it's you who's the wrong person, after all: “I don't know what to do without making it worse.” Hey, we're not all cut out for domestic bliss.
Years & Years – “Memo”
What happens to the flame of passion when faced with uncertainty? Unwilling to love in vain, Years & Years' “Memo” lights a candle for lingering longing, illuminating vivid desire. It's a love song for a new era. In 1937, bluesman Robert Johnson bellowed, “You can squeeze my lemon 'til the juice runs down my leg.” Years and years later, Olly Alexander sings, “Who wouldn't want it when he looks like that?”
Blink-182 – “Carousel”
“I talk to you every now and then/I never felt so alone again.” So begins Tom DeLonge's pre-fame ode to barely getting by on loneliness. Still a showstopper at Blink-182 concerts, “Carousel” is one of those tunes you can always turn to in a rough time. Reportedly, the song was one of the first ever written by the Blink boys.
Real Friends – “Keep Lying To Me”
Like staying with someone you don't exactly love just to stave off loneliness, “Keep Lying To Me” from Real Friends perfectly captures that empty feeling. Other lost souls are sickly ensnared in a dangerous game of make-believe intimacy. “Let's keep lying next to each other/while we lie to ourselves,” wails vocalist Dan Lambton, and you feel it. You've been there.
Weezer – “Waiting On You”
While Weezer are well-known for their Pinkerton-era gems on unrequited love, B-Side “Waiting On You” really takes it up a notch in the perceivably-scorned-lover department. If you're waiting on a date to call you back, it's probably not the best idea to let them know you've been obsessively ticking off the time since last contact: “You're 19 days late/but still I sit and wait.”
Fall Out Boy – “Alone Together”
“Do you got room for one more troubled soul?” Counting backward from relational implosion, Fall Out Boy's “Alone Together” seeks the bittersweet halfway point where you may be deserted, but at least there's a kindred wanderer to help absorb the anguish. Alas, it's not to be, and you can't go home again. “This is the road to ruin and we're starting at the end.”
Julien Baker – “Go Home”
Julien Baker sure knows how to funnel that endless existential solitude into elegant hymns of anomalous grace. On “Go Home,” she's sick, silent, dirty, defeated, “drunk on the side of the road in a ditch”—alone. Here, Baker gives credence to the ascribed Henry Rollins quote that “loneliness adds beauty to life.” If this song sounds like a spiritual, that's because it is.
Pearl Jam – “Light Years”
Leavening the loss of one departed with a near-comical list of his workaday accomplishments (“I've used hammers made out of wood”), Pearl Jam singer Eddie Vedder realizes it's better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all: “We were but stones/Your light made us stars.” One of the best songs on the band's sorely underrated sixth album, Binaural.
Sorority Noise – “Mediocre At Best”
“Nobody likes me/That's what I tell myself/I live alone in my own hell.” On “Mediocre At Best,” Sorority Noise concisely narrate the unmistakeable impact of rock bottom—that uncomfortable juncture where you realize that your blown relationships were likely undone by your own hand. The issue is hard to swallow; helpfully, the song is catchy enough to go down smooth.
Jimmy Eat World – “Spangle”
A cover of British band the Wedding Present, Jimmy Eat World captain Jim Adkins makes this song's beautifully insecure lyrics so patently his own with a low-key, bedroom-pop delivery on couplets like, “I'm glad you found the time to ring/I just spent all day waiting.” The pangs of post-breakup jealousy just come rushing back: “Did you say you met some neighbor?
Joy Division – “Love Will Tear Us Apart”
Before Ian Curtis' death in 1980, the revered frontman apparently experienced those telltale signs of a doomed relationship: “When routine bites hard/and ambitions are low/and resentment rides high/but emotions won't grow.” The poppiest song by Joy Division is also one of the saddest, and its music video was shot mere weeks before Curtis took his own life.
Radiohead – “Creep”
Radiohead's first big hit became a cathartic anthem for loners everywhere upon its creeping chart success in the mid-'90s. All but disowned by its creators following a reincarnation as avant-garde crackerjacks, the band has since come back around to playing the tune occasionally. The guitar blasts of “dead notes” (chugga! chugga!) before the chorus remain an alt-rock high point.
Green Day – “Boulevard Of Broken Dreams”
“My shadow's the only one that walks beside me” has got to be the loneliest line Billie Joe Armstrong has ever penned, the desolate description a fitting refrain for the Jesus of Suburbia character in Green Day's American Idiot. At this point in the proceedings, the provincial prince is coming to terms with his lonesome lot in life—it's depressing, it makes him feel half dead, yet it's home to him.
Daft Punk – “Within”
You'll never feel lonelier than when hearing a robot sing about how lonely loneliness is. “There's a world within me that I cannot explain,” lulls the somber android. On Daft Punk's “Within,” this lovelorn bot has, for some time, been looking for someone, and it's given the glum cyborg a bit of an identity crisis. Still not sad? Watch Daft Punk's Electroma and try not to cry.
