The Pop Of Goodbye

(McVie adds: For those who’ve already seen the following episode of the show, I’ve added a couple of songs in the end. Of course they only occurred to me afterwards while driving home [it’s amazing the thoughts that just pop into my head while behind the wheel and listening to Sarah Brightman and Andrei Bocelli’s “Time To Say Goodbye” on repeat]. So check out this episode again. As for those viewing this for the first time, I say: Hello, goodbye.)

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Saying goodbye has always been problematic for a lot of people. For years I too had to grapple with the idea of letting go. It didn’t make things easier that most of my education on the subject came from pop songs. I grew up thinking that goodbyes were a bad thing: I don’t want to lose you now. I just can’t let you go. Please don’t go. If you leave me now, you’ll take away the biggest part of me.

One of the earliest goodbye songs I liked was “Breaking Up Is Hard To Do” by Neil Sedaka. There he laments, albeit in a disorienting chirpy-cheep-cheep cheerful manner, that saying goodbye meant doom despite all the dabba-dabba-dum-doo-bee-doo-dum-dum in the world:
Don’t take your love away from me.
Don’t you leave my heart in misery.
If you go then I’ll be blue,
‘Cause breaking up is hard to do.

Often the cause of a break-up is incompatibility, as The Beatles so succinctly and repeatedly sing in the appropriately titled “Hello Goodbye”:
You say yes, I say no;
You say stop and I say go, go, go.
Oh, no!
You say goodbye, and I say hello.

Fast-forward to the Eighties and one of my biggest songs during that period was Chicago’s “Hard Habit To Break”, a song whose lyrics I took very much to heart:
Living without you
Is all a big mistake.
Instead of getting easier,
It’s the hardest thing to take.
I’m addicted to you, babe
You’re a hard habit to break.

But growing up I got to hear other goodbye songs, and not all of them were simplistic in message. Strangely enough, one of the songs to which I’d attribute my current “complicated” attitude towards goodbyes is by Barry Manilow, an artist whose name is more synonymous with schmaltz rather than complex emotions.

When I first heard his song “Somewhere Down The Road” I was quite leery of its rather blatant message, that sometimes goodbyes are not forever and that somewhere down the road, I know that heart of yours will come to see that you belong with me. I was never comfortable with the idea that someone belonged to another person—isn’t freedom something we all long for? But then comes the kicker of an interlude:
Letting go is just another way to say
I’ll always love you so.

At first I assumed that this attitude of letting go was a temporary thing, that there’s still the hope of a future reunion. But then I realized there was a more complex implication behind the lines when it occurred to me to ask: What if the goodbye was permanent? What if loving that person meant letting go of him?

My nail-on-the-coffin moment arrived when Madonna released her seminal split-up song:
Your heart is not open, so I must go.
The spell has been broken; I loved you so.
You were my lesson I had to learn…
There’s no greater power
Than the power of good-bye.

“The Power Of Goodbye” opened my mind to the idea that goodbyes can be a choice, a conscious decision to do something that may not necessarily make you feel good at first but is something that will do you good eventually.

But even if you’re the one being dumped you can still be proactive about it, as Andrew Lloyd Webber points out in “Tell Me On A Sunday”:
Let me down easy,
No big song and dance.
No long faces, no long looks,
No deep conversation….
I’d like to choose how I hear the news.

Breaking up need not be a sad thing. In fact it can be most liberating, as Scissors Sisters attest:
Kiss you off these lips of mine.
Kiss you off for a custom shine.
Pissed yours truly off this time;
It’s why I ain’t just kissin’ you—
I’m kissin’ you off!

See how goodbyes, while they can be complicated, can be simplified? It’s all up to you. And now it’s time for me to say goodbye, and I leave you with this question: What are your goodbye songs?