In the 70s, We Got Married. In the 80s, We Got Divorced.

On the rise of the divorce ballads in the 1980s

As I noted, this month Can’t Get Much Higher is being taken over by other great writers while I chip away at a large project. This week’s post comes from

Jeff Takacs

, a great musical writer behind the newsletter Houndstooth of Love. Should you enjoy Jeff’s post today, feel free to subscribe to him directly.

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In the 70s, We Got Married. In the 80s, We Got Divorced.

By Jeff Takacs

Let’s say you were born around 1950. Your music was big. Big bands. Big Hollywood. Show tunes. The Brill building. Doo-wop. Girl groups. In 1957, Disney released Fantasia and it was a best seller. Big classical!

By high school, rock n’ roll had made everything even bigger. Even folk was enormous. Apocalyptic warnings, mystical conceit.

1966 to 1970 is a very long time. So much happens in politics, culture, style and sensibility, all while you’re going from teenager to full-fledged adult. Something might be changing in you. Your objectless youthful melancholy or sense of political identity might be waning. You might begin to wonder:

Why do birds suddenly appear
Every time you are near?

Why do stars fall down from the sky
Every time you walk by?

You’re a boomer, but baby you ain’t a baby anymore. You’re getting married!

1970s Marriage: Even though we ain’t got money…

In 1970, the median age for males at first marriage was about 23. For females, it was 20.6. From 1970 to 1974, the marriage rate was higher than it had been at any point since 1950. In fact, to this day the marriage rate has not returned to 1970-1974 levels. There were simply more people — many more — getting married back then.

A new market for song had arrived. If a songwriter was shrewd enough to sign a contract and whimsical enough to know what forever means, she could move a heart and make a mint.

The Fifth Dimension hits it big–straight with Laura Nyro’s “Wedding Bell Blues” in late 1969. In 1970, The Carpenters give us “We’ve Only Just Begun.” It’s a hit on the charts and endures because it is perfect. It’s almost a duet, with Richard’s backing vocals mixed forward and cutting in for little solo moments. But it’s Karen’s otherworldly voice and Richard’s genius for arranging that makes it sublime.

“We’ve Only Just Begun” either changes the sound of popular music or is a chief example of a changed sound. It’s smaller, but warm and lush. It feels more like a fire in the fireplace than lightning on Yasgur’s farm. Light–daylight. Dusklight. Firelight. It makes these marriage songs seem like illuminated testaments from another time.

In late-1970, a young Reginald Kenneth Dwight, who goes by the name Elton Hercules John because his given name wasn’t royal enough, breaks onto the scene with “Your Song,” another sweet, intimate ballad.

I don’t have much money, but boy if I did
I’d buy you a big house where we both could live.

It concludes with a declaration that life is so wonderful “while you’re in the world.” It’s one of the biggest first dance wedding songs ever.

Also in 1970, Graham Nash ditches his big pop psychedelia to tell us a spare (but warm), piano-driven story that also has a house at its heart. It’s a very fine house, with a fire in the fireplace and flowers in a vase and two cats in the yard.

Sparer still is Loggins and Messina’s great “Danny’s Song,” from a year later, which picks up on Elton’s theme of small money and big love, and The Carpenter’s theme of having “just begun.”

And even though we ain't got money
I'm so in love with you, honey
And everything will bring a chain of love

And in the morning when I rise,
You bring a tear of joy to my eyes
And tell me everything is gonna be alright.

This is the kind of song a young couple with a guitar could play to each other while they stew some cabbage in their very fine house. And it introduces a new element: the child, “as free as a dove, conceived in love.”

“Danny’s Song” gets solid radio play, but it would take Anne Murray’s cover in 1972 to go big. Anne Murray does what Anne Murray does: clarifies and purifies. She ditches the unnecessary verses about fraternities and horoscopes, and when she sings “I think I’m gonna have a son,” it hits in a different way. It’s a wonderful performance and another great example of how marriage was in the air in 1970s pop.

Intermission: Seven is Not the Lord’s Number

In 1975, the first great divorce album is made: Bob Dylan’s Blood on the Tracks. The second great divorce album — Fleetwood Mac’s Rumours — is recorded in 1976 and released in 1977. It wins the Grammy for Album of the Year in 1978 and is always listed as one of rock’s most acclaimed albums. Side One ends with “Songbird,” Christine McVie’s lovely piano ballad about wishing the best for her lover. It feels like the first half of the 1970s. Side Two feels like the second half of the 1970s. It begins with “The Chain,” in which the whole tortured, breaking-up and divorcing band play on while Stevie and Lindsay just go ahead and murder each other.

If you don’t love me now
You will never love me again
I can still hear you saying
We would never break the chain

One can’t help thinking sadly of Anne Murray singing sweetly that “everything will bring a chain of love” just five years before.

The divorce rate has been ticking upwards for a decade, but now it’s increasing. The duration of marriages that end in divorce in the US is reliably seven years. It was then, and it remains so now. Dylan’s marriage lasted a bit longer than that, but Fleetwood Mac’s John and Christine McVie’s marriage ended right at seven.

By the late 1970s, when you’re approaching thirty, you’ve got a couple kids, your country is in a recession, gasoline prices are through the roof, and the roof of that very fine single-family home has sprung a leak. “Even though we ain’t got money” may not be the lyric you’re singing anymore.

1980s Divorce: If somebody loves you, won’t they always love you?

In 1980, Air Supply’s “All Out of Love”, written by Graham Russell and Clive Davis, from the album Lost in Love hit #2 on the Billboard chart. It’s about a couple that’s “tormented and torn apart” and just can’t find the love anymore. They broke the chain.

If Richard Carpenter helped form the warm wedding sound of the early-1970s, Clive Davis saw the paper peeling on the wall and made the big cold sound of the demolition.

1981 gives us Rosanne Cash’s “Seven Year Ache,” a #1 country song and crossover smash. Written by Cash and produced by her then-husband Rodney Crowell, the song has the big cold synth + drum machine sound of the 1980s, and its impressionistic lyrics give us a love-lost dystopia of pool halls, loners, and liars.

Also in 1981, Abba made the next great divorce album: The Visitors. It features “When All is Said and Done” and the hit “One of Us.” But their greatest divorce song comes from the previous year. In “The Winner Takes It All,” they sing the following:

The judges will decide
The likes of me abide
And I understand
You’ve come to shake my hand

The US divorce rate peaks between 1980 and 1985. ABBA’s Agnetha Fältskog and Björn Ulvaeus were married in 1971 and divorced in 1980. Frida and Bennie had been together for most of the 1970s, married in 1978, and divorced in 1981.

Also in 1981, Luther Vandross reads the room and sees that half of the paintings are gone. He remakes Dionne Warwick’s “A House is Not a Home.” It’s a classic of the quiet storm genre. Brewing since the mid-1970s, the Quiet Storm and its “deep, cognac smooth vocals,” as Naima Cochrane describes it in this terrific Vibe essay, flooded the 1980s with songs of lost love, illicit love, and reconciliation.

Phil Collins — first married from 1975 to 1980 — is the king of these emotions. In 1984’s “Against All Odds (Take a Look at Me Now),” he’s imploring his ex to see that he is an empty void without her. He holds out some hope that she’ll come back, which is where “Against All Odds” comes in. In 1985, he’s hurt, he’s lonely, and he’s pissed. In “Separate Lives”, one of many, many duets from the era, Phil and Marilyn Martin sing the following:

You have no right
To ask me how I feel
You have no right
To speak to me so kind
I can’t go on just holding on to time
Now that we’re living separate lives

If the stripped-down 1970s love songs were played together in the kitchen, the 1980s love songs are played in the neighborhood bars where the divorced guys flirt in vain with fantasies, and over the late-night radio on the patios of the new developments after the kids have been put to bed and mom can slip out of her heels and into her turquoise tracksuit, pour herself a glass of Chardonnay, and gaze at the spindly, just-planted trees. “Your property value will increase as these trees grow up,” she recalls the realtor saying.

She gazes at the real estate investment and pretends they’re old-growth oaks in a romantic, misty forest full of princes, and she is a princess in white linen with perfume on her wrist, which is the subject of Heart’s smash hit “These Dreams” in 1985. The lyrics of “These Dreams” are by Bernie Taupin, who had written the lyrics to Elton’s “Your Song” a decade and a half earlier. Bernie knows his subject well. His first marriage was from 1971 to 1977. He’s now on his fourth.

The fantasy of “These Dreams” is absent in the whole of the next great divorce album, Bruce Springsteen’s 1987 Tunnel of Love, which gives us “Brilliant Disguise.” “Brilliant Disguise” is filled with divorce-song brilliance.

Oh we stood at the altar
They gypsy swore our future was bright
But come the wee-wee hours
Well maybe, baby, the gypsy lied

Tonight our bed is cold
I’m lost in the darkness of our love
God have mercy on the man
Who doubts what he’s sure of

While I could go on, I think it’s worth ending this piece on a hopeful note. We began with The Fifth Dimension’s “Wedding Bell Blues.” We’ll close with what might as we be called “Second Wedding Bell Blues.” It’s Cher and Peter Cetera singing “After All” from the 1989 film Chances Are:

I guess it must be fate
We’ve tried it on our own
But deep inside we’ve known…

After all the stops and starts
We keep coming back to these two hearts
Two angels who’ve been rescued from the fall
After all that we’ve been through
It all comes down to me and you
I guess it’s meant to be
Forever you and me
After all.

Is this whole essay just a wordier recapitulation of Billy Joel’s “Scenes from an Italian Restaurant” in which Brenda and Eddie call it quits in the summer of 1975? Maybe. But I don’t care.

I dedicate this to my wife, Lise, who holds the world in a paper cup and puts flowers in the vase that she bought today. We’re still going steady after nine years, longer than there’ve been fishes in the ocean, against all odds.

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