Anatomy of a Breakup Playlist

I decided to do a series of posts based on the songs I listened to a lot after I went through my most recent breakup. The idea for the series came to me about a year after the breakup itself, so it’s not something I decided to do as a way to grieve a fresh loss or anything. Actually, I was kind of going through what turned out to be the final (I hope) phase of my grief, where the milestone of being apart from my ex for a full year brought back a slew of memories, emotions, and nostalgia that sort of caught me by surprise.

It was around the holidays, and Spotify had just brought to my attention a playlist of the songs I had been listening to the most that year. I realized that a lot of them were songs that I liked because they reminded me of the breakup I had been going through. Most of them were songs that my roommates would recognize, simply because I listened to them so much, and I wondered if my roommates knew why I loved them so much. Would they have been listening closely enough to catch on to the fact that they were all breakup songs? The truth is I normally don’t like to share music that I love with too many people, especially when it holds such deeply personal significance to me, because I know they’ll never react appropriately. How could they ever know the gravity of what certain songs mean to me when they haven’t lived my life? So, in an attempt to convey that gravity and maybe share a little bit more of myself, I decided to compile the songs into a playlist and write about them.

In each post, I’ll write about a select song or songs from my “breakup playlist” and attempt to explain why I loved them so much when I did. At the very least, I hope someone is able to discover a new song (or two or three) that they like from this series.

My full Spotify playlist of breakup songs is below, so feel free to listen at your leisure. And without further ado: Part I: Gone Insane