Learn to enjoy this type of upset

Just as summer was getting started, I was handed the unenviable combination of going through a tough breakup and being unemployed. Neither of those conditions changed over the subsequent few months, but I found a silver lining in the ample opportunity and sadsack inclination to listen to a lot of music. Some of this was of considerably poor quality, embraced only because it was easily (and lazily) relatable in a moment of vulnerability. But I digested a lot of really great stuff too, songs that had universal themes and broad appeal without resorting to the kind of uninspired platitudes you can hear from any coffeehouse singer. Here are six superb tunes that have helped get me through this rough patch.

The Weakerthans - Civil Twilight (2007)
Let's start with the somewhat scattered thoughts of a recently-dumped bus driver. The poor guy has to endure the torture of driving by the scene of the breakup every hour each day, his mind rearranging the faces of his passengers into the one face he doesn't need to see. He tries to distract himself by counting the seconds and reciting provinces (Canadian band alert!), but once the sun sinks out of sight, he has as much trouble keeping her off his mind as he does coming to a stop on the icy roads. There's just enough crunch in the guitars and drive in the beat to occasionally make you forget our hero's desperation, but as in his case, it can't be fought off all day.

Ron Sexsmith - Hard Time (2008)
The night is a challenge for Ron Sexsmith too, but his mornings aren't any better. This is a simple, straightforward song, but impeccably crafted. He colors the edges with muted horns and croons sharp lines like "since I lost her love, seems I've lost my balance."

The Last Shadow Puppets - The Meeting Place (2008)
"He struggles to sleep at night, and during the day he's worried she's waiting in his dreams to drag him back to the meeting place." The foggy, dreamy orchestral pop setting holds the tiniest hind of dread alluded to in this line. It also lends a more mysterious status to the titular location, which is not a material place but the echo of a voice. The lush instrumentation, outstanding songwriting, and slight surreality make this one of the year's best songs.

Bob Dylan - You're Gonna Make Me Lonesome When You Go (1975)
Thematically, this song is a bit of a stretch, but only just. It's wonderfully sad and so well-written it seems useless to praise it with words that couldn't match up. So I won't even try. Just listen.

Belle and Sebastian - Another Sunny Day (2006)
Stuart Murdoch is one of the best lyricists in the game. The fondly-remembered vignettes of the first five verses paint a picture of a relationship as brilliant as the striking instrumentation. The present tense used in all but a few lines makes the scenes more immediate and engrossing. Of course, in the end all this acute bliss only serves to salt the wounds revealed in the final stanza. I've been trying to avoid the laziness of extended lyric quoting in this post, but this song is so near perfection from start to finish that I feel I would be denying you otherwise.

Another sunny day, I met you up in the garden
You were digging plants, I dug you (beg your pardon)
I took a photograph of you in the herbaceous border
It broke the heart of men and flowers and girls and trees

Another rainy day, we're trapped inside with the train set
Chocolate on the boil, steamy windows when we met
You've got the attic window looking out on the cathedral
And on a Sunday evening bells ring out in the dusk

Another day in June, we'll pick eleven for football
We're playing for our lives, the referee gives us fuck-all
I saw you in the corner of my eye on the sidelines
Your dark mascara bids me to historical deeds

Now everybody's gone, you pick me up for a long drive
We take the tourist route, the nights are light until midnight
We took the evening ferry over to the peninsula
We found the avenue of trees went up to the hill
That crazy avenue of trees, I'm living there still

There's something in my eye, a little midge so beguiling
He sacrificed his life to bring us both eye to eye
I heard the Eskimos remove obstructions with tongues, dear
You missed my eye, I wonder why, I didn't complain
You missed my eye, I wonder why, please do it again

The loving is a mess, what happened to all of the feeling?
I thought it was for real; babies, rings, and fools kneeling
And words of pledging trust and lifetimes stretching forever
So what went wrong? It was a lie, it crumbled apart
Ghost figures of past, present, future, haunting the heart

Stevie Wonder - Please Don't Go (1974)
It was tough to leave off Stevie's propulsive lament "Another Star" (and let me just say how disappointed I am that, per Google, two people have beaten me to the phrase "propulsive lament"), but for me, "Please Don't Go" has no peers among breakup songs. This one features a simple but heartbreaking melody, the kind of inventive chord changes that were falling out of his pockets those days, and one of his most soulful vocal performances ever. Just when he's got your heart strings firmly in hand (with help from some soaring backing singers), at three minutes in he swerves into an upbeat quasi-gospel number, and thirty seconds later a total left turn into gritty Ray Charles territory to the fadeout. An exhilarating ending to a masterstroke of musical expression.