#68, “Salome,” Old 97’s (1997)

150 Favorite Songs: #68, “Salome,” Old 97’s (1997)

Here’s an interesting fact that I hadn’t fully considered until I sat down to write this: Most of the great break-up songs are not recordings by men. They exist, certainly—“Lover, You Should Have Come Over” or “End of the Road” or “What Becomes of the Broken Hearted” or “Don’t Think Twice It’s Alright” or “Yesterday”—but if you think about the greats, they’re mostly performed by women. Consider: “I Will Survive,” “All Too Well,” “You Oughta Know,” “Wrecking Ball,” (Miley or Emmylou!) “Landslide,” “Someone Like You,” “Ex-Factor,” “I Can’t Make You Love Me,” Since U Been Gone,” “Torn,” “Dancing On My Own,” “Don’t Speak,” “Untouchable Face,” etc, etc, etc.

I think there’s a reason for that. It’s not that men can’t feel heartbroken over a relationship, but so much of the mix of feelings that go into a great breakup song are (at best) tacky to hear expressed when a man is singing about a woman. “You Oughta Know” is great because it’s heartbreak and rage, and those sentiments are interesting and powerful when a woman is expressing them towards a man. When a man expresses them towards a woman, you’ve got “Last Resort” by Papa Roach or the catalog of Limp Bizkit. The power dynamics in straight relationships are such that “you did me wrong” or “I’d do anything to get you back” are sentiments that are compelling when a woman sings them, and threatening coming from a man. A dude singing “you did me wrong” to some lady who made him sad is not a great look most of the time. Is that fair? Maybe or maybe not—men are entitled to their feelings, too!—but I think any reasonable accounting of a breakup is more nuanced than a song allows, and that lack of nuance becomes more noticeable when it’s being sung by a man.

That said: “Salome” is a pure break-up song of the “you did me wrong” variety, sung by a man to a woman whom he blames for why he feels bad, and I think it’s one of the best examples of how there are no hard-and-fast rules to these things. There’s just veracity and truth and feeling. I’ve been listening to it for at least forty-five minutes in a row now, looking for some sort of tackiness that might be there now, as someone who has not felt the pain of being broken up with in many many years, and I can’t find it.

How does “Salome” avoid the traps that might come from this sort of song? There are a few answers to that, some of which seem inherently contradictory. One, it’s very pretty, much prettier than it needs to be. Two, it goes real fucking hard, in every way that it can, until it is pure in its hurt and anger and sadness. Those things allow Rhett Miller to walk a very narrow line here that lets him sing lines like “I’ll find another lady / and you’ll wreck another man” or “my blood’s turned to dirt, girl / you broke every part of me” while sounding honest and devastated, rather than petulant, whiny, or manipulative.

There are a few tricks going on in “Salome” that make that work. First, there’s a weariness to his voice throughout the entire four minutes that make those lines feel earned. He sounds exhausted throughout the entire runtime of “Salome,” like he would rather be doing anything other than singing about this girl and how it ended. That weariness plays really interestingly with the guitar that opens the song, which is a lovely, lullaby-like melody that does not conjure sentiments of a man betrayed; together, you get a sort of ironic undercutting of the expected emotion from each, which makes the song a surprise even if you know what to expect from it. But that pretty guitar drops out as soon as he starts singing, and the band—which was nominally a country band before Too Far to Care, the major label debut on which this song first appeared—goes back to its roots, with a traditional 4/4 stomp, a slide guitar swirling in the background, and a spaghetti-western guitar riff that undercuts the chorus. The result is a song that’s vivid, almost cinematic, in the way it conjures its sense of heartbreak. You don’t need the lyrics to tell you that this is a song about a guy who’s down bad—everything about the way “Salome” sounds gets that across. By the time he gets to the pre-chorus, which repeats three times throughout the song, it all feels so lived-in that it lands in just the right way. It’s not really about her, whoever she is, and it doesn’t ever hint at what exactly she did, because who wants to hear some guy re-litigate a breakup in a song? Instead, it gets really specific about the way he feels: tired of making friends, tired of making time, sick to death of love, and sick to death of trying. Is that her fault or his? Does it matter?

I love “Salome” because there were a few times, mostly between the ages of twenty-one and twenty-four, when I was tired—maybe even sick to death—of those things, too, where I felt like a young lady who it turned out was not going to be my future had broken me, and listening to “Salome” gave me some comfort. It didn’t hedge its feelings—“i’m sick to death of love / and i’m sick to death of trying” is as embittered a line as anything Alanis sang, but it is, as a therapist might note, an “I” statement. The lines about what she did to him are vague, the lines about how he feels are specific. It’s clever and effective, and a big part of why “Salome” is a rarity among breakup songs, and one of the under-heralded greats of the genre.