The art of the breakup album

0:00It was already a big year for breakup records. Jason Isbell, Amanda Shires, Fleetwood Mac, RIP so many, many times. But Silver Springs was born again again again this year. And then last month, Lily Allen's West End girl landed like a 10-ton bomb on top of her ex. We had an arrangement. Beat a street and throw me blatant. There had to be payment. It had to be with strangers. But you're not a stranger, Madeline. And we all had so many, many thoughts. I was scandalized by this album that Lily Allen put out. I checked out the album, and I do have something to say. My jaw is on the floor. Like, I would watch the album as a movie.

0:49Breakup albums have been around for half a century, but for better or worse, they are evolving in a parasocial age. That's coming up on Today Explained.

1:02Today, Today Explained. Coleman Spilde, Senior Culture Writer, Salon.com. Tell us, who is Lily Allen and what did she do? That is a very interesting and complicated question. Lily Allen is a British musician and a tabloid fixture. And now she is back with her new album, West End Girl, which is taking her sort of confessional songwriting to the next level by revealing every sordid detail about the dissolution of her marriage to David Harbour, the actor from Stranger Things and Marble fame. West End Girl tells quite a tale. What is the tale that it is telling? So this is an album about a woman who is really excited to be in this marriage.

1:50She's been swept off her feet by this handsome man. And she's moving to New York to start her new life with him. We hear that in the opening title track of the album West End Girl, which is sort of a sing-songy introduction to the album. We've moved to New York. We found a nice little rental near a sweet little school. Now I'm looking at houses with four or five floors and you found us at Brownstone said you want it. It's yours. At the end of this opening track, we hear the recording of a one-sided FaceTime conversation between the two of them. Where Lily is sort of talking to the person on the other end of the phone who seems to be asking for maybe it's an open marriage.

2:31Maybe he's confessing infidelity. Maybe he's asking for a certain kind of marriage arrangement. I mean, it doesn't make me feel great. Then she is sort of thrust into this anxiety spiral, which a lot of listeners can probably relate to if they've ever been in any kind of a torrid relationship. You have the follow-up track, the second track on the album, Ruminating. This frenetic drum and bass song.

3:04She's remembering this line that he told her over the phone.

3:10If it has to happen, baby, do you want to know? The end of the song, she just repeats what a fucking line over and over and over again. And then through the rest of the first half of the album, she's throwing sort of back-to-back songs like Tennis and Madeline, which Tennis is all about coming home to find that her partner may have been texting another woman. So I rate your taste She's asking over and over who is Madeline. And who the fuck is Madeline? Who the fuck is Madeline?

3:43The very next song is answering that question. So it's sort of like a call and response that really invites the listener to have a lot of fun with it. What are we supposed to be feeling by the time we finish? It sort of flips a little bit to go a bit more introspective, thinking about, you know, what can I do to be part of this relationship as he wants it to be? What can I do to make him happy? what sacrifices can I make? So then you have songs like Non-Monogamummy, where Lily is kind of wrestling with her traditional ideas of motherhood, and then being a mother who is also non-monogamous, which doesn't quite fit for her.

4:22And then you have the sort of coda of the album where she is finding some contentment with it and just accepting that this is someone who's never going to change. Cause it's not me And this is someone who didn't have her best priority in mind and someone who prioritized themselves over the love of their marriage.

4:47All right, so there are two types of reactions to this album. One of them is the offline reaction that is your sister and your sister-in-law texting you. You have to listen to this album. And then there is what happened on Al Gore's internet. What was the reaction online? There was a couple, there were a couple different reactions online. If you're a man who's ever been confused about what kind of information your girlfriend's asking for when you tell her you know somebody broke up, this. This is what she wants. And at 3.54 on June the 11th, I spotted a cube on your antidepressants, knew she must be a vulgar.

5:24People were starting to look at it as a morality tale. So you had this initial reaction that was listening to the album and vilifying David Harbour and all of this. The girl was a shell of herself. She was like the ghost of Lily Allen in that relationship. People like this should not marry another famous person. You want some non-famous person who's going to worship the ground that you walk on and never be more successful than you. Calm down. You are in the Stranger Things. You had people who were calling for boycotts of the last season of Stranger Things, people who said that he should never be working in a Marvel movie again, and people who were really equating, you know, personal romantic problems with sort of illegal sins and making infidelity into something that should be punishable by a law or by firing, which is just not how we work as a society.

6:18People were digging up things about their relationship. People were really interested in finding out more because it has that sort of car crash element to the album. People were looking at their shared Architectural Digest home tour of their Brooklyn brownstone. People were analyzing the way that video started with David Harbour opening the door and kind of making a joke about the camera person being the other woman. Last time I was single and I was living on the Lower East Side, I have a family now. Kids, I mean, this is so embarrassing. You look good, though. And then you also had people really digging into the sort of, like, West End girl of it all and looking at how David Harper responded to Lily's part in her first play.

7:04And they also dug up an old Instagram story from Lily about flowers that he had sent her pre-opening night. He wrote on the note, These are bad luck flowers, because if you get reviewed well in this play, you will get all kinds of awards and I will be miserable. Signed, your loving husband. People were really able to take these things and feed into them because they were all public as it was. And so it helps proliferate that narrative that Lily was already spinning.

7:34Then there was another layer to that, which I find almost even more fascinating, was that people, as the album became more popular over its release weekend, were looking at it and then suddenly digging up things about not just David and Lily's marriage, but Lily Allen herself. They dug up an old Twitter row that she had with Azealia Banks. What Allen tweeted at her neck was a photo of her husband's at the time in blackface. When I saw that in my comments, that's unforgivable. So Lily Allen is not a good person. They dug up confessions from Lily Allen saying that she, saying that much of her last record, No Shame, was about her infidelity with her husband.

8:20So it's kind of this idea that people are running to make the artist behind things or to tear them down as much as possible. Do people like this album because it's a good album? Do people like it because people love a train wreck? Or do people like it because in 2025, it is saying something much deeper than what's on the surface? As a critic, I would have to say it's a little bit of everything. It's funny because it's an interesting album. You know, the music itself may not be the most unconventional or the most left field in its production, but it is filled with earwormy hooks and interesting lyrics and fun phrases that kind of keep you coming back to it and really drill into your head, which is really part of the genius of making a breakup album like this is you want to keep returning to it no matter how sad it is.

9:17And also, I think people really do love the train wreck of it because there is a sort of rubbernecking sensationalism of people love to look at a car crash. I think that people are really eager to tear people down in the public sphere when they seem to have any wrongdoing that they've done. And some people also like to dig in and uncover stuff and proliferate it online and on social media and add to the narrative themselves. So it all becomes kind of a bit of a game, but it all also works in Lily Allen's favor too.

9:59Coleman Spilde, he's a critic at Salon.com. Coming up, 50 years of breakup albums and the culture that created them.

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14:09Today Explained. My name is David Metzer. I'm a music historian. I teach at the University of British Columbia, and I'm a scholar of love songs, including breakup songs and breakup albums. So I actually wrote a book on ballads, which are essentially love songs. And with love songs, you've got to deal with the falling in love and having love fall apart around you. Tell me how you would describe the current moment when it comes to breakup albums. I think really a lot of it has to do with our social media age in which we live in, in which any personal news becomes a source of fascination. And you have to weigh in it.

14:47You have to disclose aspects of it. So that's what I think a lot of artists are using breakup albums in part for. It's a way of getting their side of the story out there and making a statement. And it's obviously much richer than a tweet or an Instagram post or something like that. The breakup album is nothing new. Where does it begin? The earliest one I found for breakup albums is a Nat King Cole album, I Don't Want to Be Hurt Anymore, from 1964. I don't want to be hurt anymore. And he remains hurt throughout the whole album, to be honest. I'm alone. How can I face the dark? Didn't you even laugh and leave me crying then?

15:37It doesn't let up, let's just put it that way. And then it's really in the 1970s that the breakup album takes off. Just before our love got lost, you said I am as constant as a northern star now A classic example is Joni Mitchell's Blue from 1971 in which she ruminates on her relationship with Graham Nash, which had just ended, her relationship with James Taylor, even looks back to her first marriage there. I drink a case of you Just pretend I never have fun But then the breakup album takes all these strange directions in the 1970s. One is in country music. You have Willie Nelson putting an album called Phases and Stages, which is an album which on side A presents the woman's side in the breakup.

16:31And before you wake up, I'll be gone. On side B, the man's side of the breakup. Well, it's a bloody merry morning, baby. Left me without warning sometime in the night. And then... I guess I'll have to say this album is dedicated to you. This has to be the strangest breakup album of all time. Marvin Gaye put an album called Hear My Dear. This album is just really about his divorce and just like how painful that divorce has been. And the album is dedicated to her.

17:15And it's a double album. And it goes to strangest places. Like there's one kind of Star Wars fantasy about them hooking up in three centuries from now in outer space.

17:36And then we just hit this really rich period in the 2020s where we have had albums from Beyoncé, Becky with the good hair, Livvy Rodrigo, You said forever, now I drive alone past your street, Kacey Musgraves, I hate you and I love you, Adele, Go wheezy, Help me, baby, And what's very interesting about this period with albums is that we have both sides of the breakup giving us albums. So there's the Jason Isbell album that came out recently. I'm sorry the love songs all mean different things today. And it was responded to by his ex, Amanda Shires. I remember cleaning up after you and too many nights alone.

18:24Or we have the two sides. Also, that happened with Kacey Musgrave's Star Crossed, which is about her breakup with Rustin Kelly. Two lovers ripped right at the seams. Who released his own breakup album after that. My marriage ended and I moved up north to men. So it's fast and furious with giving your side of the story these days. We started the show talking about Lily Allen, and there is a sense in that album, a very vivid sense, that Lily Allen wants to win the breakup. She's like, I'm going to tell you every damn thing this man did to me. You know who he is. We do. Is releasing a breakup album into the wild, into people's ears, is it about winning the breakup?

19:12Well, obviously there are stakes in these breakups. That's why we have the other partners putting out albums. People view it as a war. And even Marvin Gaye back in Hear My Dear, for him, it's definitely, you know, getting even in all sorts of ways. With the Lily Allen album, it definitely is. I mean, one of the last lines in it is, it's not me, it's you. Everyone said, oh, this album came out right as David Harbour was doing press for Stranger Things. And it was like a way of sticking it to him. Has the way in which artists released these albums changed at all in the last like 50 or so years? Yeah, we never saw anything like this before.

19:51I think Nat King Cole was happy in love. He just decided to put out a sad album. Jodi Mitchell, she's ever so kind to her exes in that album. He put me at ease and he loved me so. Naughty made me weak in the knees. I suffer again from Marvin Gaye's two-album bitterness. You can leave, but it's going to cost you. I haven't seen anything like this before, and I think it really is a reflection of the social media age, where maybe even tweets, whatever posts, you know, they don't have the ring that they once used to or the weight that they once used to. So you've got to put out something bigger, and the album is that something bigger.

20:32What are kind of the necessary ingredients for a breakup album? Yeah, it has to be reflection to some degree. It can't just be all this bitter spew of bitterness. And you have to offer the listener something broader to think about than just like, that guy screwed me over. And let me tell you some details. You have to offer them something broader. And again, not to treat Joni Mitchell as, not to put her on a pedestal, although she should be. But she had a line which I think summed it all up. She went to make it clear to listeners, it's not really about me. It's actually about you, the listener.

21:07So I have this one quotation I'll just read, which I think is beautiful. The trick is, if you listen to that music and you see me, you're not getting anything out of it. If you listen to that music and you see yourself, it will probably make you cry and you'll learn something about yourself. And now you're getting something out of it. Joanie Baby. Joanie Baby. And it's so right. It's like, don't look for the details. You should have some beautiful things to reflect upon and really things that can open you up. And one of the ways that breakup albums in the 1970s differ from breakup albums today is the type of language that is used.

21:50In the 1970s albums, it's all very much about suggestion. No lover is named or even really pointed to in very specific ways. Rather, it's just really that the listener knows that there has been a breakup, and that's enough. And so they have you think about this breakup in these broad, universal terms, and to open yourself up to these rich moments of emotional reflection.

22:17How important are the endings of the breakup albums? What do they need to do? I think one of the fascinating things about breakup albums is what the last song is. because where's this person going to be after pouring out their heart for like 45 minutes? And where are we going to be as listeners after hearing all this? And usually it's three options with these. The first is when I'm going to call still bitter, that you are still upset about this relationship and you have nothing but bitterness to pour out. The second one is figuring it out. You're starting to put the pieces together and you're starting to say, yeah, maybe I was part of the problem.

22:59And the third option is moving on, where, yeah, you're going to start to take your first steps past this breakup. And moving on involves pulling yourself together. You can, you know, now you have a good idea what happened and you're ready for something new, or in some cases, falling in love again. And everyone takes a different step. So with Lily Allen, it's a combination of still better and figuring it all out.

23:28I'm a mess, I'm a bitch, I could fit. With the Nat King Cole album that I mentioned earlier, it's like I'm all cried out. There isn't a tear left to cry. But you know, I believe she's gonna walk through the door once again, and when she does, I'm gonna be ready to love her all again. And I won't have to cry. And then the Jason Isbell album has this beautiful conclusion to it. The final song after going through all this self-examination and a little condemnation of the partner ends with this beautiful song called Wind Behind the Rain.

24:13Which is a song he actually wrote for his brother's wedding. It was to be the first dance song for his brother's wedding. It's all just about the beauty of commitment.

24:25So to go through that psychological storm and end with something hopeful like that is truly beautiful.