Loved? An Anti-Valentine's Day Mix

Barring the outside chance of climactic seismic activity, I will be alone on Valentine's Day this year (i.e. tomorrow). This is nothing new, I've never been with anyone on Valentine's Day ever. Nevertheless, I will feel more alone this year than I've felt in, well, a long time, because, for reasons that are far too personal and involved to properly recount here, I do feel that I'm inherently unable to create or sustain a lasting romantic engagement. So I decided to channel all of my miserablist energies into creating an Anti-Valentine's Day mix. Even made a cover and everything.

HERE'S THE DOWNLOAD LINK

Here's a track by track run-through:

1. I Think I Need a New Heart - The Magnetic Fields

In previous years of being alone on Valentine's Day, the main occupation of my day would be listening all the way through the Magnetic Fields' sprawling 69 Love Songs triple album. It has been said a million times before, but it's pretty much an encyclopedic exploration of relationships or love, or of the lack of existence of the latter. This is one of the more jauntily bleak tracks.

2. No Action - Elvis Costello

Elvis Costello originally named his third album "Emotional Fascism" before changing its name to the more conventional "Armed Forces." I agree. Love and relationships are not unlike war. When you're in a relationship, to a certain extent you subsume your personality in the personality of your partner, and your whole being becomes defined by your relationship. Similarly, as a soldier at war, your whole being is defined by being a soldier at war. And that's why Post Traumatic Stress Disorder exists - when you get out, you feel like there is nothing left to define you, and you just sort of float. Elvis Costello sounds like someone who has been there, and who has come out of the other side of that tunnel.

3. How I Taught Myself To Scream - Los Campesinos!

I could have put in almost any Campesinos! track from their second semi-conceptual album about breaking up, which I've listened to with increasingly obsessive compulsiveness over the last few months. But I feel like this non-album track is best at capturing the bitterness of realizing the transience of relationships.

4. New Romantic - Laura Marling

I've already discussed this one at length here. I still really like the song, in that it helps me get a sense of the fairly alien (for me) perspective of a young girl who makes some pretty tough choices between paramours.

5. The Hymn for the Cigarettes - Hefner

Hefner, similar to Elvis Costello, manage to idiosyncratically dissect the gender wars. This song in particular is an affecting exploration of how the stuff that we like defines what we like in our partners. We always look for our complement, someone who loves all of the stuff that we love, which is both good and bad. It's good in the sense that loving the same things means that there is an inherent sense of connection, mutual understanding and communication; it takes people of a certain temperament to really be into Belle and Sebastian or Wes Anderson, for example. [This is pretty limiting in terms of a choice of partners. To quote another Los Campesinos! song, "it's not what you like, it's what you're like as a person, well I need new hobbies, that's one thing for certain."] It's also bad in the sense that with this connection come unreasonable expectations of stability.

6. Heartless - Kanye West

Kanye managed to pull a pretty remarkable feat in making a double concept album - 808 & Heartbreak. It's a concept album in content and in execution. The concept - breaking up, feeling lost and alone. The execution - chilly 808 drum machines and inhuman autotune singing. It's not a perfect marriage [umm, irony?], but it works. Sometimes. In this song.

7. No One Will Ever Love You - The Magnetic Fields

In this Magnetic Fields song, I really like the line "if you're not here, to make my sad songs more sincere..." It really shows the degree of artifice inherent in any contemporary relationship. I am basically aping Chuck Klosterman's "This is Emo" essay here, but we have all of these expectations of our relationships and significant others from movies (fuck you John Cusack!), TV shows, and books, and these will inevitably be dashed because it's impossible to live the same 90 or so minutes over and over again. We, and by "we" I mean "I," are unprepared for living in the real world and experiencing real emotions and real people.

8. I Will Never Love You More - SoKo

Listening to this song gave me the initial idea of making this mix - all the way back in the distant and mythical 2008.

9. Why Bother - Weezer

I knew I should have listened to Rivers, all the way back in grade 9.

10. If Winter Ends - Bright Eyes

Of all of Connor Oberst's 'I'm sad and broken hearted' songs (and there's probably about a million of these), this is the one that sounds least mannered and most genuine to me.

11. Love Was Dead - Laura Wolf

Tom Whyman's "indie-pop pin-up," Laura Wolf, is notable for the fact that despite having limited solo output (at least based on her MySpace), she's written both a fantastic love song (Happy New Year) and a fantastic anti-love song (Love Was Dead). You can probably guess [or um, know, if you look above] which one is more useful to me at the moment. But the interesting thing about these songs is how similar they sound - both are the products of hazy keyboards and tinny drum machines, tied together with catchy vocal melodies. Playing them straight through sounds like they're a natural progression from the former to the latter; the lovelorn declarations of "I'll follow you wherever you go" of Happy New Year decomposing into the belief that "romance is a myth and love is boring" of Love Was Dead.

12. For Emma - Bon Iver

Bon Iver is a singer, songwriter, and an escapist fantasy. It's really the last line here that makes this song, when he goes "for Emma" and then he pauses for a second, and sings "forever ago" (which actually sounds like he's saying "for Emma" again if you're not listening carefully), before segueing into an instrumental conclusion. It turns a song that could have been a bitter expression of his hang-up on Emma, into an elegaic ode to burying the past and moving on with his life. Coming out of the woods, so to speak.

13. The Ice of Boston - The Dismemberment Plan

More of a New Year's song than a Valentine's Day song. Actually, no, it's much more general than that. It's a song about being alone while you know that a very particular someone else isn't. But regardless, I basically put this one in the mix for one verse towards the end [well, for that and for the general passive aggressive lonely tone, which reminds me of the way I generally tend to conduct all of my relationships.] - "woke up at 3 AM with the radio on/ and this Gladys Knight and the Pips song on/ about how she'd rather live in his world with him than live in her own world alone/ and I lay there, head spinning, trying to fall asleep/ and I thought to myself 'Oh, Gladys girl, I love you but, oh - get a life!'" It's the kind of epiphany of personal worth and self-empowerment that I'm still waiting for.

14. I Don't Love Anyone - Belle and Sebastian

A fitting ending.

UPDATE: Alternate download link - http://www.megaupload.com/?d=FXZIEK1H