"Portions for Foxes" is a series of weekly posts, each about one song by a woman or a band led by a woman. See the introduction for more.
As we get into the cold time of the year, here's something appropriate: a song of sadness and lost love and broken promises, about how everything gets worse, more complicated and more difficult as you get older, written by a great songwriter and sung by a great singer.
They're both the same person: Tracey Thorn. The song is unironically titled Oh, the Divorces! and it's from a record called Love and Its Opposite, which is mostly about the opposite.
It starts like this:
Who's next?
Who's next?
Always the ones the ones that you least expect
They seem so strong
It turned out she wanted more all along
The singer is not the one divorcing, which is unusual for a song like this. She's watching, seeing her social circle change and break - and there's an undertone of "how can I know I won't be next?"
Oh, I know we shouldn't take sides
But that one was his fault
This one is her fault
No one gets off without paying the ride
And oh, the divorces!
It's a quiet song, the kind of quiet that's all-encompassing and devastating. It's just Thorn's voice, close and confiding, over piano at first and then some light strings later, like you're listening in on her internal thoughts.
And it's a deeply adult song, in a way that feels rare: a song talking about a stage of life and a worry that's just not part of normal pop music. You have to walk down a lot of road to get to a song like Oh, the Divorces! That's one of the things I love about it.
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