“No foreign pair of dark sunglasses will ever shield you from the light that pierces your eyelids, the screaming of the gulls”
There are break-up songs, and then there are songs that understand what it actually means to be broken.
“Born Sandy Devotional” by The Triffids belongs to the second category. David McComb conceived the album around unrequited love, but its heartbreak is never confined to the bedroom or to the private vocabulary of a failed relationship. It spills into the landscape. Into the weather. Into the sea. Into the merciless Australian light.
That is why these lines from “The Seabirds” feel like a classic for broken hearts. You can put on the darkest sunglasses you own. You can turn away. You can close your eyes. It makes no difference. The light still finds you. The gulls are still screaming. The sea keeps moving. The world refuses to stop just because somebody has left it.
There is something almost cruelly beautiful in that image: heartbreak is not darkness. It is too much light. The wound is not hidden somewhere inside you. It has become the landscape itself.
“Born Sandy Devotional” is perfect for its content and for the series of covers I’m doing for Ed Nolbed’s “Breaking Up Is Never Easy I Know.”
The sunglasses don’t work.
The eyelids don’t work.
The distance doesn’t work.
The covers of “Breaking Up Is Never Easy I Know” work like a game of mirrors with contemporary pop imagery. They are not simply accompanying visuals, but true visual quotations that echo and reinterpret famous album covers in which artists have spoken about the end of a relationship.
Listen to Ed Nolbed “Breaking Up Is Never Easy I Know” here.
