If there was any justice in this world, “I Gotta Get Away (From My Own Self)” by Ray Godfrey would be a classic soul standard. That it was lost and overlooked in its day somehow makes it even more poignant. I don’t remember where I first heard the song, but at some point I had found a copy of the seven-inch single going for a dollar or two, scuffed and barely protected in a tatty paper sleeve. Soon after, I was run over by a juggernaut heartbreak and I played the record constantly. Like all the best tunes about being dumped, it pulls an “I Will Survive,” and provides the lovelorn listener with the promise that they will get through the misery, get over the other person, become stronger because of the experience. But the more I listened to the song, the more its existential title resonated, because there’s a point during a breakup when you begin to feel so utterly bored of your own pain, your own moaning and moping, that you do, indeed, want to get away from yourself, and to stop listening to the same songs over and over. During this same miserable period, I also was also cheered by Vernon Green and the Medallions’ ‘Behind the Door,’ a doo-wop ballad of abject proportions, in which the singer, jilted by his lover, declares that he is prepared to offer forgiveness. What I love about this melodramatic song is that its tone hovers on a line between deep hurt and sarcastic anger, between stoic acceptance and an ugly sanctimony. This really comes out during the spoken word section near the end, in which the singer chides the lover for being a careless heartbreaker, and is accompanied by the most astonishing rising falsetto I’ve ever heard. I find it impossible to hear this without laughing, it’s so over-the-top. The falsetto toes a line between irony and sincerity, both in sympathy with the lead vocalist’s pain, but also seeming to say, “c’mon, really?” When you’re feeling hurt it’s hard to recognize your own faults and indulgences, and ‘Behind the Door’—perhaps accidentally rather than deliberately—manages to capture that mixture of pain and self-pity. Of course the only thing that beats listening to a great song about love lost, is to sing one yourself. Soon after this breakup, I bought a digital piano—one of those full-size ones with proper weighted keys—and, blame the delirium, decided I wanted to learn how to play some Kurt Weill songs. I had been struck by a version of Weill’s “Lost in the Stars” as sung by Lotte Lenya, and I managed to get good enough to stumble through my own rendition without sounding too much like an elephant hammering out a lullaby. The tune is gorgeous, but the lyrics are deeply cosmic. The song imagines God holding the stars “in the palm of his hand”, letting them run “through his fingers like grains of sand”. He loses one small star and when he finds it again, promises to “take special care so it wouldn’t get lost again.” The next lines observe how most people assume that we’ll be OK, that God’s upstairs looking after everything. Then comes the kicker. “But I’ve been walking through the night and the day, til my eyes get weary and my hair turns grey, and sometimes it seems maybe God’s gone away, forgetting his promise that we heard him say, and we’re lost out here in the stars…” There is no resolution to the song. God doesn’t reappear. All we have in common—”big stars, little stars”—is that we are all drifting through the universe, lost and looking to be found.