Five years ago, I broke up with a boy. I went out with this boy for only a brief time — three months — but somehow I had managed to fall in love with him. Our split only strengthened this love (provided you define “love” as “obsessing over the sad trivia of every word and gesture, while continuing to allow said boy to use you for sex post-breakup, and simultaneously boring your friends and family with your single-minded attention to imagined nuances in his tone of voice, not to mention your clever imitation of a doormat, to the point where they consider pulling a Michael Hutchence, or at least hoping that you do,” but at the age of nineteen, some of us have trouble distinguishing between genuine love and pointless self-flagellation, especially those of us who had the honor of a single-sex education for twelve years). Anyhow, without revisiting this somewhat trite period of my life in too much detail, this boy and I had first become friends because we both rather admired a little British band called The Sundays.

Another boy, my first true love, had introduced me to The Sundays, and until meeting The Object Of Obsession I didn’t know that anyone else had heard of them. TOOO and I listened to the album many times during our pathetic courtship, and during that thirty-minute window when our relationship showed signs of life, the group came out with their second effort. We played that album to death too, and when we broke up, I listened to nothing else (save the occasional full-length wallow in Patsy Cline, but I suppose that goes without saying).

I remember reminding myself many times during that period that the pain of a broken heart reminds us that we are alive, and I remember thinking how perfectly The Sundays seemed — and still seem — to trap that notion in song. Harriet Wheeler’s clear, flexible voice and David Gavurin’s soughing guitar approach the sublime — not the meaning we tend to use today that denotes something wonderful beyond compare, but the Romantic poets’ notion of something terrifying and beautiful at once. Not to push the envelope of pretention too far, but the songs of The Sundays capture those moments when sadness becomes beautiful, and those moments (usually of the past) whose very beauty has become a object of mourning. Anyone who has ever listened to The Platters and heard Tony Williams tear the throat out of that last sustained note of “My Prayer” knows what I mean — inchoate longing funneled through a voice that scarcely seems to belong on earth.

A couple of months after the breakup, a group of us went to see The Sundays at the now-defunct Academy. TOOO brought his new girlfriend, and I wanted to hate her but I couldn’t because I actually liked hanging out with her. We wedged ourselves in close to the stage, far over on the right, and The Sundays proceeded to blow me away. Harriet’s voice sounds even better live than it does on the albums, hitting complicated runs with ease, never seeming to push too hard. They played “I Kicked A Boy,” the song I had waited for so eagerly, and I exchanged knowing looks with my friends. Then I bought a T-shirt and we all went home and The Sundays disappeared off the face of the earth and I got over TOOO one night about a year later when he mouthed off to someone in a WaWa market and I looked at him and thought to myself, “What a jackass,” and then I realized that I had just set myself free.

In the intervening years, TOOO and I managed to cobble together a solid friendship, and he has acquired a girlfriend that we all love to hate. I thought that The Sundays might commemorate this historic event by coming out of retirement, and I had all but given up hope when I saw a flier advertising their long-gestated third album about six weeks ago. I nabbed it immediately, and as with the other Sundays albums, I liked two songs immediately and the others grew on me with repeated listenings. I looked forward eagerly to the tour. Unfortunately, the tour arrived with so little fanfare that I didn’t know about it until the venue had already sold out.

I couldn’t ask TOOO to come down from New Haven to scalp tickets to a show. But I called the Couch Baron (TOOO’s best friend and thus the long-suffering go-between, and one of my nearest and dearest as a result of his uncomplaining stint as Switzerland) and asked if he felt like braving the gale-force winds and obnoxious scalpers in order to see The Sundays, and he said yes, so off we went on our adventure. After talking a scalper down to $37.50 from $50 (and watching two rabid English fans pay the $50, thus seriously impairing our chances of getting the hoped-for tickets for only $30 each), we dashed inside to heal our frostbitten fingers with some alcohol. I have seldom spent money more wisely. The Supper Club’s acoustics and sound system served The Sundays’ sound perfectly. They played all the old favorites, and all the new favorites. Nobody tried to mosh like last time. We wrung four encores out of them. Best of all, all of the other fans knew every single word just like we did, and sang along very loudly and off-pitch just like we did, and it felt like a reunion of sorts — we got drunk, we sang, we remembered the past as something terrifying and beautiful at once.

Hmmm, you’d think that this article would have a point, and now that I read it over, it doesn’t seem to. Well, so it goes.

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