Kat Says: “Congratulations Laura, You Made The Top 5”
Join me as I explore the musical map of my breakup landscape.
Are you enjoying Kat Scrawls? Do you think your friends would enjoy it? Please consider sharing this newsletter with a friend who likes good tunes and silly essays, and please always feel free to respond to this email and share your thoughts with me—or “like” it or leave a comment, or tweet it or something. Just spread the love and holler back, I’m always here for you ;)
Words are hard. Love is harder. Losing love is hardest of all.
What do you do when you’re going through a breakup? I like to watch High Fidelity. It’s my go-to break-up comfort film.
Having just rewatched it a couple Thursdays ago, I know for a fact that it is a ridiculous movie. All the characters are assholes, and none more so than the leading man. Still, I’ve always been a sucker for the Cusacks (this movie has both!) as well as any and all slacker films about losers with big hearts and bigger opinions on pop culture.
There’s nothing more endearing for me in that cry-on-your-friend’s-couch moment than three, over-the-top, music-obsessed morons bitching about the cultural relevance of The Jesus and Mary Chain as if owning this or that certain record has any bearing on the stability of your personal life.
At its core, High Fidelity is a movie about growing up and learning to recognize your own faulty patterns. It’s also a movie about music and the people who love it to a point that’s a bit unhealthy and definitely distractive. That blend of self-destructive obsession and deep personal reflection makes it my kind of movie, even if it is centered around one pos cis-het white dude. I don’t personally hold that against it.
In the spirit of unpacking my own personal baggage and moving through my latest sour affair, I’m choosing to do something overly-personal, writing and reflecting on my own Top 5 Breakups, representing each ex-lover with their own song. I’m not naming any names, but if someone happens to, like, know who I’m talking about, well, that’s just part of life.
I mean, these dudes decided to date a writer. It’s not my bad.
Ladies and gentleman, without further ado: my past.
The Cure - “Love Song” (2005)
My first love hit in high school, the way it does for so many of us; overwhelming, overpowering, totally riddled with the chemical high of unbridled hormones and the rush of things young and new. I’d known him for years. We were both in the middle school band, but I’d never paid attention to him much. It was my best friend who did that, really. He was her first big crush. She was truly obsessed. I think she even kept a shoe box under her bed with stuff that made her think of him.
I didn’t go into ninth grade thinking I was going to steal him from her. I didn’t go into ninth grade thinking much of anything but “please god, don’t let high school be as painful as middle school has been.” He was the one who came at me on the brutal concrete between band camp practice sessions, all weird and goofy and suddenly interested in what I had to say. I was this black-clad goth monster who refused to wear shorts to marching rehearsals (even though it was Florida summer and terribly hot). He was the eldest son in a hardcore Christian family who secretly bought a cassette of Black Sabbath’s debut album and, apparently, wanted more of whatever that was.
I did ask my best friend if she would be mad if we dated. She said she wouldn’t, but what else was she supposed to say? At least it wasn’t for nothing. Me and Mr. “Love Song” had a real thing going for a couple of years. I introduced him to post-punk and depression. He introduced me to The Silmarillion and HPV.
Things changed when he started getting credit around school for all the cool music I’d shown him. He was traditionally very handsome, and I was the resident weirdo. People started to wonder what he saw in me, not realizing it was my healthy catalog of alternative music and, you know, general all-around awesomeness.
The day before his 16th birthday, I found out he’d been running around for months telling all his friends he was going to dump me, only to come with me back to my house after school to do what teenagers do when they’re alone, then totally not have time to talk to me on AIM after he left. I was pissed, naturally, so I came to school the next day and said “happy birthday. I’m breaking up with you,” and that was that.
I don’t harbor any ill will toward Mr. “Love Song.” Everyone eventually figured out I was just as cool as he ever was, probably cooler, but who’s counting? He’s married now, to another woman who was in the high school marching band. He’d text me sometimes. The best time was when he took acid for the first time and decided to let me know. It was an honor to be a part of that trip, even if it was also hilariously weird.
Oh, me and my bestie are still totally besties, btw. We met randomly after me and Mr. “Love Song” broke up on the dance floor of an all-ages rave. There was a lot of crying and hugging, and that took care of that. As it turns out, friendship is the real love that lasts for always.
David Bowie - “Moonage Daydream” (2008)
After I dumped Mr. “Love Song” on his 16th birthday, I had a couple weird relationships—chief among them my inappropriate relationship with a 24 year old who legitimately thought he was a vampire, but I’ll tell that story another time. Then there was a guy obsessed with the Presidency who moved to Tallahassee with me after high school graduation, but those breakups didn’t really matter. What mattered was the space-age heartbreak that came barreling toward me at top speed, soundtracked by the feverish freak out of the bloghouse era.
“Moonage Daydream” boyfriend was another friend from high school, although we were kind of frienemies in my mind for a while, because he was so mind-bogglingly surreal that I just had to be kind of frustrated and amazed by this person all at once. He was chasing some kind of nightmare, and so was I. We leaned on each other as the only people we knew at our new college, and that’s when our friendship became something romantic and our violent paths converged.
It started bad and it ended worse. I cheated on Mr. President with “Moonage Daydream,” and because we were terrible people, we hacked into my ex-boyfriend’s Facebook account and changed the status to say terrible things. My ex said we were “wraith-like,” and we were like “guffaw guffaw, what a tool,” but he was right.
We fed the best and worst parts of each other’s personalities. We stayed up all night listening to records, playing pool, learning to use Ableton and eeking out weird electronic sounds on this Roland Juno-DS that I bought with excess scholarship money. We lit stuff on fire for no reason and rented art films from the independent video store. He taught me how to pack my own bowls and be a pothead. We were two suburban weirdos who found ourselves suddenly off leash in a great-wide nowhere, and Justice’s † gave us a license to feel better than we’d ever felt in our lives.
It went really well for a couple years, but there was the summer that I moved in with him and our best friend and paid $200 a month to sleep on the couch, because he “got too hot” if we slept in the same bed. That was…kind of shitty, and there were all kinds of kind-of-shitty things going on between us. I took the kind-of-shitty crown, though, when I cheated on him with our best friend a couple months after we moved to Gainesville together.
Look. I’m not proud of anything during this period in my life. I did have enough respect for “Moonage Daydream” to admit my crimes to his face. He was very upset, but our relationship was already kind of at its end, and we both knew it. We’d been friends before we were lovers, and we both tried desperately to stay friends, which led to a whole year of seriously bad, seriously violent scenes; cops getting called on us, people getting put in psychiatric holds, uncomfortable confrontations between people with no clothes on, someone’s ear got bit off. It was a lot.
The truth was, neither of us were happy with who we were. We were struggling with some serious psychological bullshit, and I’m happy to report that we have both grown up into much healthier, much more stable adults who contribute to society in somewhat meaningful ways.
We’ve both learned that love is not supposed to be traumatic, and while we both still definitely have an overdeveloped sense for strange adventures, we’ve learned to keep and respect our own personal boundaries and those of others. It’s just that you’ve got to learn some of life’s lessons the extra hard way.
Grizzly Bear - “Knife” (2009)
This next relationship; it was great in its way, but I really had absolutely no business getting into it. You know that phrase about meeting a good person at a not-so-good time? Well, while I was busy making a giant mess of my life with “Moonage Daydream” and our best friend, I met this cool guy in Gainesville who was witty and clever, who wore colorful American Apparel v-necks and tight jeans designed for women from the thrift store. He was a total, card-carrying hipster, and he was just awesome.
Whenever I slept at his house, he’d fall asleep listening to Grizzly Bear’s Yellow House album, and it became seared into my brain as much as the way a person has their own smell. He was the first person to show me Arrested Development, got me an account on the illegal peer-to-peer website WHAT music, and became my first boyfriend that actually had his own car. He wasn’t going to college, but instead had a big-boy job at the local hospital, so it was kind of like he was super mature and grown-up—but he wasn’t. Neither of us were, yet.
He was super supportive of me as I started getting my first stories published in the student-run paper. He was convinced I was gonna be a star, and he helped me see what I was capable of, but he was also extremely jealous and prone to violent fits. He never put that violence on me, but he did things like throw chairs in the front yard and cry-scream at me that “people only go to clubs to get laid,” so why was I going out every Saturday night even if he wasn’t with me? Well, I was busy becoming a music journalist and stuff, so why was he so paranoid?
Unfortunately, he was right to be paranoid. I was still in the process of cleaning up my mess when we started dating, and it ultimately destroyed the connection we were trying to grow. I broke up with him out of nowhere one day, because I thought maybe I’d give it an honest shot with someone I shouldn’t have, and when that fell apart in a matter of days, I tried to get “Knife” back.
Maybe he really was more mature than me, because he didn’t fall for that. In fact, he’d already started to fall for someone else; another cool and quirky woman who was destined to do big things. He was moving on to become someone else’s supporter, and that made me really sad. I spent the next few years feeling incredibly guilty about the way I’d treated a perfectly nice person.
In the end, I was able to see that we just weren’t “right” for each other, and also that maybe there’s no such thing as being “right” for anyone, but I also learned in this process who I didn’t want to be going forward. I didn’t want to be a person who put my need for instant gratification before someone else’s feelings. I didn’t want to be a person who “committed” to someone without really committing to anything at all. I promised myself that next time would be better, and if it all fell apart, it wouldn’t be my fault.
Disclosure - “White Noise” Feat. AlunaGeorge (2012)
After destroying a few lives and nearly my own in the process, I decided I’d give dating a fucking rest for a while. I lived the last few years of my college experience as a single woman, free to sleep around and not catch feelings with whoever I wanted. It was great fun, and then I graduated and moved back to south Florida where met this older guy who worked with my friend at the Apple store. He DJed around town sometimes, made really cool art, did too much cocaine, and knew all about this cool new genre called “future bass.”
He was cute or whatever. I decided I would sleep with him, but I honestly had no intention of taking it any further. I didn’t believe in love anymore of whatever, but he seemed to take things more seriously. He wanted to be my boyfriend, and I was like, “ooh gee, okay. I guess so!” Then he wanted me to meet his mom and I was like “oh wow, she’s cool. You’re cool. This is cool.” Then he started talking about maybe we should move in together when his lease ended, and I was like “holy shit, am I in a real adult relationship? This guy is like 31. Is this fucking happening?”
No. No it was not. I had allowed myself to be lured into feeling safe and loved. I had let my guard down and totally committed to someone, trying my best to prove that I was an understanding human worthy of love who wouldn’t cheat on you or get you stuck in weird valium-fueled swimming pool fights. I was a cool professional who got you free tickets to see Charli XCX at The Garret, even when I wasn’t in town to go with you! But alas, being a nice and trustworthy woman of access doesn’t mean fuck all in love and war.
Just liked I’d turned on “Knife” seemingly out of nowhere, Mr. “White Noise” suddenly decided he was done playing my game of hearts. He didn’t do it gracefully. He actually got mad at me one day when I asked to hang out and told me to leave his house but swore that didn’t mean he was breaking up with me. I stood in his front yard for an hour hysterically crying, telling him I was pretty fucking sure this is what a breakup looked like, and he was all “no, it’s not. I just want you to leave me alone. Get your shit together.”
By the time I drove back to my house, he texted to say he was sorry and asked if we could have dinner at my place the next day. I said yes, of course, that would help a lot, but the first thing out of his mouth that next afternoon was “I think we should put a moratorium on this.”
If there’s one thing I know about myself, it’s that I will cry in front of you one time and one time only. Now that he was owning up to his dumping of me, I was nothing but enraged. “Get the fuck out of my fucking house, you stupid fuck.” I said something like that a bunch of times, to which he was all “I can’t believe you’d just throw away everything we have.” Bitch, what? Who is throwing away which now? He wanted to be “friends,” but that was silly. We had never been “friends.” He was the guy I was fucking that tricked me into falling in love, and there was no going back from this.
Well, I was only 24, and I was pretty immature. I did try coming back from it a few times. I’d delete his number, then miss him and find it again, then text him like we were cool for a week, then get upset and text him nasty things about how he ruined my life and delete his number again—over and over and over again.
We only dated for nine months, but it took me like three years to really get over “White Noise.” It didn’t help that we’d run into each other and music festivals and concerts and shit, then go home and sleep together again, sending my head into this fucked up fantasy where “maybe it will work one day.”
Eventually, I saw a picture of him on Instagram with his new girlfriend, and my immediate reaction was “oh, that’s so nice.” I realized I was done. The feelings were gone. I realized he had done me a favor. I had a lot of work to do on and for myself, and I hadn’t been in a place to have a serious adult relationship, and certainly not with some guy in his 30s who did too much coke.
I don’t keep up with him, but I heard he’s actually doing better than ever in a super healthy relationship with someone he really cares about. I’m happy for him. I hope it stays that way.
Daft Punk - “Something About Us” (2022)
If I had been over love before, my sudden “but I did nothing wrong” breakup with “White Noise” left me walking scorched Earth. It also left me with a lot of time and space to take a close look at my romantic past and realize some things about myself. If I had found myself the subject of chaos, it wasn’t because “terrible things just happen to me.” It was because I myself welcomed and inflamed chaos, and that probably had a lot to do with circumstances of my childhood and yada yada yada. I did a lot of processing, and I did a lot of it on the road.
I sold all my shit and moved from Miami to nowhere at all. I got really comfortable with the idea that I would spend the rest of my life alone, and that was honestly alright. I wasn’t looking for love, although it would be nice to find a partner who could really be my equal, someone who didn’t need me but wanted me, and vice versa.
More than a handful of people have used the word “manifested” to describe my most recent relationship. I’ve never been one to like, make a list of attributes that I was looking for in a man, but there are a lot of things I’ve just talked about loving in my life, and suddenly, this person appeared loving all those same things.
It took about three days on a boat to become really freaked out, staring at this guy on a cruise ship balcony while he played Justice’s “Valentine” into Daft Punk’s “Something About Us,” shaking with the fear and excitement at realizing I’d literally never felt this way about a person before.
It wasn’t just that we shared an interest in French touch, hip-hop, staring up at the sky, talking about the existential place of man in the universe, the beauty and rhythm of language, street art, introspection, sci-fi and the like. It was the way he carried himself and considered things deeply. It was the way he saw the world and was open to change. It was the way he could be so gentle with me, but also hold me to a standard that made me feel like I could be greater than I had allowed myself to believe. It was the way he made me feel safe and seen; the way he respected who I was and trusted me to be trustworthy without ever being jealous or misunderstanding; the way I didn’t feel this need to explain myself and the way he always had the perfect words when even I didn’t know what to say.
It wasn’t a perfect relationship, but it was the relationship that taught me that nothing is perfect and that’s actually beautiful and okay. Love is hard. It takes work, but it is possible to approach that work with kindness and maturity and respect for the other person. In nearly four years, I don’t think either of us ever once raised our voice at the other (well, except for this one time I blacked out with him on the phone and said a bunch of shit I kind of regret, although it ended up being this mantra that changed his view on life and art or whatever, and I guess in that respect, I don’t regret it any more).
It’s the relationships that showed me where I’ve built walls around myself and how I can overcome them and create space for me to grow, professionally and personally. It’s also unfortunately the relationship that taught me that unconditional love and understanding does not breed more of itself, and just because you can see yourself with someone doesn’t mean they can see themselves with you, and sometimes you actually deserve more than someone is able to give.
I am hurt and I am disappointed, but I actually don’t feel any less confident in myself or sure of who I am and what I’m doing with my life, which is kind of a new thing for me in this position. I am really thankful for a lot of things, and while I’m still very much mourning, I’m also going to be okay, and I know now what I’ll be looking for if the chance to fall in love ever comes my way.
So, yeah. Words are hard, love is harder and losing love is hardest of all—but being able to look at yourself in the mirror and love yourself through whatever may come makes all of that other stuff actually pretty okay.
Now that you know everything about me LOL, I hope you’re still sort of into reading this newsletter. I hope you’re somewhere beautiful on the journey toward loving yourself and others, and I’d love to hear what songs remind you of the people that have touched your heart and changed your life throughout the years.
Keeping in theme, Wednesday’s paid-sub newsletter will be a list of my favorite breakup songs, and I promise there are some tunes on that list that you never even realized were about break ups! You have to sign up to pay-sub to see it, though. I think you should do it, but I’m totally biased, of course.
Coming Up
HOLD ON TO YOUR FUCKING HATS.
KAT CALLS IS FINALLY BACK!!!
Thursday, Sept. 12: Kat Calls: Totally Enormous Extinct Dinosaurs. I have been working on this booking since January, people! And it’s finally happening, because TEED finally released his sophomore album, When The Lights Go. It’s 17 tracks long, and it’s beautiful, emotional and groovalicious from start to finish. It ebbs and flows. It’s a journey really, and he said it’s about “love and the end of the world.” Fitting! Can’t wait to hear all about it :) I hope you join us at twitch.tv/katbein.
Absolutely Necessary
(This is the part where I share songs that are so good, they’re absolutely necessary to listen to. That’s it. That’s the bar.)
I made two Spotify playlists for this section that you can follow: one weekly playlist updated with just the new stuff every week, and one cumulative playlist that will host every song I pick ever (until Spotify tells me it's full). Check them out! I made them for you—and me, but mostly you.
Y’all. I promise I will one day write about the songs on my playlists again, but not this week. I have a dog to sit. Just know that the playlists are updated, and there’s all kinds of good shit on there. Please enjoy!
Thanks for tuning into my newsletter. Listen to the playlists on Spotify. One is updated weekly with all the songs from each edition. The other is cumulative with all the updates ever!