#52, “Regret,” New Order (1993)

150 Favorite Songs, #52, “Regret,” New Order (1993)

I can’t decide if “Regret” is the saddest happy song I know, or the happiest sad song. It’s one of the more wistful songs you can dance to, which is different from being a “dancing with tears in my eyes” dance song. There are a lot of those—Diana Ross has them, Prince has them, Whitney Houston has them, Robyn has them, the XX have them, etc, etc—but “Regret” isn’t exactly about dancing through the pain, which most of the others are. It’s more sorrowful than it is outright sad, which I suppose is fitting for a song called “Regret.”

There’s a plaintiveness to “Regret” that’s present in the lyrics, and in Bernard Sumner’s voice as he sings them, that works so well with the barely-danceable beat behind them. It feels like someone singing about realizing that they’re going to a club for the very last time in their life, that they’ve aged out of that part of that life, and that while they have feelings about it, those feelings aren’t strictly bad. The lyrics are vague, in the way that feelings are often vague and hard to articulate—i would like a place i could call my own / have a conversation on the telephone / wake up every day, that would be a start / i would not complain of my wounded heart—is a cry for simplicity, but also there’s sort of a moon-june-spoon element to the rhyme scheme there. It’s not exactly Leonard Cohen, but it works to set the wistfulness the song is after.

I think that’s what I like so much about “Regret”—it’s just a perfect, but surprising, match of music and lyrics. If New Order had gone as hard on “Regret” as they did on “Bizarre Love Triangle” or “Blue Monday,” then I think the song would have lost its heart to the ironic tension between a full-on club song and a song about regrets. If they’d gone fully maudlin, the way that this minor-key piano version by the Afghan Whigs does, it would have been just another in the big stack of good, sad songs. But it splits the difference into something unique and specific, that feels like growing up and realizing that the things that were important to you when you were younger have grown into new things, and that needn’t be a bad thing.

Many years ago, I was working with MTV. It was mostly a writing gig, but they also threw me an extra fifty bucks each week for typing up a hundred words or so about a podcast interview that Matt Pinfield did with some musician or another. It was easy work, and even after my career reached a point where I stopped taking many fifty dollar jobs, I did it because it was very easy to do and because it gave me an excuse to listen to people talk about the music they made. I remember one of them was an interview Matt did with Peter Hook, who played bass in both Joy Division and New Order, and he talked about “Regret,” and he described it as the last good song the band ever did. It took them eight years to make another album, and while I disagree with Hook (“Sixty Miles an Hour” and “Someone Like You” on Get Ready are both bangers), I can understand why he felt that way. “Regret” isn’t the last good song they did, but it’s a song that would have sounded good as a last song from the band. They could have broken up after releasing it and it would have made sense. It’s a song about saying goodbye to something, after all, and one of the most interesting ones anybody ever wrote. That’s always going to be hard to follow up.