The Tracks of My Tears
It's a lock in at the late night bar for losers in love. Inspired by our very own Etta Vale's new release, we fish the change from our pockets and wonder what to put on the jukebox.
Etta Vale’s new release on The Datura Tapes is a haunting, elegiac tale that turns on a single, devastating “what if?” — a quietly monstrous question that reshapes a life and lingers long after the last chord.
Etta Vale — “Before I Turned Into A Tree”
“I just had this real feeling of loss, and that I wanted to freeze in time and turn into something inanimate, as if that would make me safe, remove the heartache” says Etta of her new release on our sister audio imprint, the Datura Tapes.
“It seems such a stupid wish, to give up on yourself over something you only briefly glimpsed” she continues. “But it was so blindingly and annihilating real, even if it was for simple seconds. A way out. A something different that could really be mine. But it wasn’t.”
Listen to the full track on our Soundcloud here
“I can still see you, and me
And my heart still breaks at what that was meant to be…”
“As ever Etta conjures up incredibly powerful poetic imagery” says label creative director Mujiki. “By the time the track finishes everything has been stripped down to her single and solitary voice. Gives me shivers, we love Etta’s super brave take on this new song, but it’s not an easy listen if you’ve ever lost a real true love. Who doesn’t know what that feels like?
In the mood for a real downer? Here’s the tracks we would put on our misery mixtape
Massive Impact: “I must have played it twenty times in a row when I bought the 12-inch home”
Massive Attack — “Unfinished Sympathy”
We’re coming out the blocks hard with this one. Not just one of the great heartbreak songs, but one of the great songs, period.
“I simply can’t over-state the impact this song had, not just on me” says Dom of our in house production team darkStylus, “but on everyone I knew. Everyone’s jaw just hit the floor when you dropped the needle and that percussion beginning started.
“I must have played it twenty times in a row when I bought the 12-inch home. It was everything, Nelson’s voice is like the greatest Soul or RnB 60s singer, the feel of it was like the darkest Four Tops cut, psychedelic Beatle strings, polyrhythms from Fela Kuti and Talking Heads, it’s all sort of ‘in there’, but not in any form you’d heard before.
“No real structure to it either, it sort of has a chorus I guess, but it was less a song and more just, a perfect moment. It all somehow…not just ‘worked’, but seemed to have invented something totally new in the space of five-minutes.
“When US hip-hop seemed to be dominating every scene, I loved that it could only be English, and it could only be from Bristol — if Britannia was ever cool, this was the time.”
“Like a soul without a mind
In a body without a heart
I'm missing every part”
Enough said.
Mazzy Star — “Halah”
For such a little thing, Hope Sandoval’s voice was a haunting presence, towering over early 1990s alternative music, standing motionless dwarfed by her microphone stand, she blew out headphones in bedrooms across the world — and no more so on this tune from legendary LP “She Hangs Brightly”.
There’s an overwhelming sense of a door closing on something that should have been wonderful. But even as she gives in to the inevitable, she has one last ask…
“Before I close the door, I need to hear you say goodbye…
…Baby, won't you change your mind?
Read ‘em and weep.
“But just before I see that you leave
I want you to hold on to things that you said
Baby, I wish I was dead”
Robyn wasn’t dancing on her own, we were all right there with her...
“This track’s shadow looms large across everything since, and will stick around as long as heartbreak is a thing, which is to say, forever”
Robyn — “Dancing on my Own”
Sweden, the champions of melancholic breakups. Abba? The decks too stacked. We thought about heading to Norway for Mr Little Jeans “Good Mistake”, but felt it too much of a detour. But really there is no getting round this track, arguably THE entry into the recent canon of post breakup music. From the flawless pop-juggernaut that is Body Talk, an LP played once a week here at DarkArc (I mean, at least) Robyn paints a picture of pathos, part pathetic, part-defiance as she dances solo at a club looking over at a lost love.
This track’s shadow loom large across everything since, and will stick around as long as heartbreak is a thing, which is to say, forever.
“So far away but still so near
The lights come on, the music dies
But you don't see me standing here
I just came to say goodbye”
The Four Tops — “Walk Away Renée”
We at The Tapes have a theory, that Levi Stubbs could sing the ingredients to baked beans to you and still make you weep your heart out. So couple ‘the voice’ with tearful poetry in the lyrics, an orchestral arrangement for the ages — whilst the other tops provide a greek chorus of grief? Even statues needed a whole box of tissues.
That final “you’re not to blame'“ rings out forever
Just walk away, Renée
You won't see me follow you back home
The empty sidewalks on my block are not the same
You’re not to blame
When Smokey sings, I hear violins...you can’t argue with ABC
“If a perfect pop single is three minutes long, then this cut, at 2:59 is, in The Tapes opinion, the GOAT. Really, who’s done it better?”
Smokey Robinson — “Tears of a Clown”
Sure it’s Motown again, but with a vault heaving with heartache, if any label merits two entries here, Detroit’s The Hit Factory is it. If Levi is all pained agony, Smokey is all adrift melancholy, taking the tale of Pagliacci to the pop charts in this painful portrait of hidden heartbreak. If a perfect pop single is three minutes, this cut, at 2:59 is, in The Tapes opinion, the GOAT. Really, who’s done it better?
“Now there’s some sad things known to man
But not too much sadder than…”
The Blue Nile — “Tinseltown in the Rain”
Dom is an 80s kid, and describes numerous nights of this track on headphones, crying into endless tins of cheap super-strength lager. This is the sound of a city becoming a ghost map. Paul Buchanan’s voice sounds like it’s being transmitted through a rain-slicked public phone box. It captures the exact moment you realise the “great event” of your life is actually happening in the past tense and you’re caught up in this great ripple.
“And it’s easy come, and its easy go.
All this talking, talking…is only bravado”
Joni Mitchell — “The Last Time I Saw Richard”
The cynical, older sister to the “Renee” sentiment. This is no romantic farewell to a happier time, it’s a song about two people who had a “chance encounter that promised everything” and ended up as “café cynics.” It’s hearts ossifying in real-time, moving from romanticism to a dark, quiet domesticity.
“The last time I saw Richard was Detroit in 68
And he told me all romantics meet the same fate someday
Cynical, and drunk, and boring…
someone in some dark café”
Paul Simon — “Still Crazy After All These Years”
We at The Tapes are in AWE of Simon’s lyrics. He can conjure whole lives in a single couplet, and this might be the greatest example of the art in history.
“I met my old lover on the street last night
She seemed so glad to see me, I just smiled”
Hell of a way to start anything right? It’s a song that feels like you’ve found a diary down the back of a sofa. Lost loves, twining lives and a sucker punch “I’ll never worry, why should I?…It’s all gonna fade”.
A masterclass in suggested stories, it ends on a surprisingly hopeful note “Though I would not be convicted by a jury of my peers.” He really is still crazy after all these years.
The Knife, beautiful…and bonkers
The Knife — “Heartbeats”
darkStylus are obsessed with The Knife. And Fever Ray. And I mean unhealthily so. Their “What synth is that?” conversations can last WEEKS.
Dada synth pop and inscrutable lyrics can seem pretty impenetrable to mere mortals, but on this track they seem rather…sweet. A very catchy tune bounces along while the usually bonkers Karin Dreijer trills a sweet story of the innocence of young love (I mean probably, who really knows?)
All rather lovely, and has the chilling effect of making the rest of their output sound even weirder, if such a thing is possible.
“Ten days of perfect hues
The colours red and blue
We had a promise made
We were in love”
Tom Verlaine — “Pillow”
Probably an odd track, the more obvious Verlaine tune about lost pasts would maybe be Television’s “Days” (be more than all we have…), but this one haunts us.
Not only does it have one of his best guitar riffs (which means, by extension, one of the best by anyone), but also some of his most heartfelt and heartbreaking lyrics. Who is the person he’s describing but only hints at? Was it a romantic split that proved traumatic. “A man and woman furious”?
The constant refrain “That picture on the wall, A bluebird in a tree” leads to a hauntingly repeated “Something here is not resolved”.
A lost love but also “Oh you were such a clown, out on the balcony”. A story of poetic and comedic imagery, full of contradictions, that comes across like a fragmented slow-motion memory.
In the end, it seems a very fond remembrance, even with the brutal last line “These pains are very hard.”
“You are remembered well
Putting on your overcoat in June
Slipping off that old corsage;
It's nothing, really nothing...”
Elvis Costello — “Alison”
There’s a lot of greatest ever lyric writers in this line up, so we have to finish strong, and who better than new-wave laureate Costello to finish with Aces in this deck of despair?
So this song then, one of the true greats of ‘what if’.
We’ll leave it there and go cry in our coffee.