250. Song No. 3,719: “Garden of Love,” Aqualung
Memory Man, 2007

I’ve gotten so used to Matt Hales making music from a place of marital contentment that I’ve forgotten how well he writes a devastating ode to heartbreak. But this nearly six-minute post-mortem of parting words and dead flowers in a fallow field just delivers line after gut-punching line that recalls every promising blooms’ foretold fade and a relationship that was doomed from the outset, plagued as it was by terrible misillusions and other risks that come without ever knowing which way you’re supposed to be going together.

I never dramatically posted lyrics from this song as a stand-in for actually talking about what hurt and why. I never sobbingly choked out any part of this song when it cut too deep and felt too real. I never caught a wisp of a well-timed line and felt like someone was setting the wreckage of my feelings to music. But I still feel every word and wound of this song to the point that it’s almost hard to listen too closely to for too long because the heartache it sings of is so familiar and just one bout of indulgent introspection away from bubbling to the surface.

There is something uniquely awful about that breakup that’s best for the both of you even though you would’ve been each other’s wholly perfect person had the timing been just a little better, the romance that starts off with such potential but either burned itself out or presented itself prematurely, because there’s nothing quite as awful as the best decision that hurts like hell and comes with an interminably lingering sense of regret nearly eclipsing the much healthier and kinder release you both gave to the other. And I don’t think anything encapsulates that feeling and that finality quite like this song’s bittersweetly recurring “Before you go, a few words for your heart” plea.

Lyrics like that are what this song does. It makes listening to “Garden of Love” feel like all the best hits from your worst breakups: It is emotionally exhausting, even if you’ve managed to keep most of that past damage from stealing your (or anyone els’s) current happiness, but not unpleasantly so. There’s some catharsis and self-assessment and comfort in the safety of distance from everyone this song sounds like, but there’s also this song itself, with its quiet intensity and wounded resignation and love that doesn’t know anything else than consuming everything in its path until it spectacularly flames out.

Much like this song, which ends in a breakthrough outburst that demands to be sung out in recognition of seeing some part of your past self in someone else’s work because it is one of those beautiful and terrible unifiers of the human condition riding in on another fucking life lesson learned the hard way:

So we pushed and we pulled with our nerves of steel
You had the pedals and I had the wheel
And the terrible misillusions
We never knew where we were going

There’s only so much that our heart can grow
Then everything else starts to overflow
But you’re young and in love
Back then there was no way of knowing