A List of the Best Divorce Albums for Valentine's Day

Welcome to the latest edition of All the Music of All the World, our weekly series where we aim to share music worth being passionate about. Consider us a guide who can help you get the most out of your Victrola by giving you new music to listen to, or new ways to think about music you already know.

Tomorrow is Valentine’s Day, that day devoted to Cupid, his bow, and his effect on our coronary systems. Everywhere you look today—be that on email or on your favorite social media platform or website—will be inundated with Valentine’s reminders, ads for flowers, recommendations, recipes, places to take a date, and every other way you might choose to celebrate love and all its symptoms.

I say pish-posh to all of that: Let’s talk about divorce albums. Divorce is the most universal of relationship experiences; at this point, do you even know someone who hasn’t been touched by divorce? I know people who have never been in love, but I don’t know anyone who has never had a divorce in any branch of their family tree. It’s one of the few collective things we all have seen and experienced apart from being happy the New England Patriots biffed the Super Bowl last weekend.

Which is to say it’s predictable that there have been several albums—entire bodies of work—devoted to divorce. Artists: They’re just like us. But it’s worth noting I’m not talking about breakup albums: Those are a dime a dozen. It takes a special relationship implosion, a singular artistic mind, to devote an entire album to a legal separation. Breakup albums are only about people separating; at their heart, divorce albums are about so much more. Who forgot to tell the other they loved them enough? Who got the best attorney? Who got vindictive in the proceedings? The best divorce albums answer these questions, and break divorce down to its quotidian dissolution.  

Tammy Wynette, D-I-V-O-R-C-E

We start with the Don Diva of Divorce, Tammy Wynette. Breakup songs and albums were old hat in country music by 1968, but Tammy took things to another level with this album, which had covers of songs of lost love (her cover of “Yesterday” hits hard), but is lead by the title track that is devoted to how horrible divorce is that she can’t even talk about it in front of her son without spelling the words out.

Bill Withers, +’Justments

This is probably the least “definitely a divorce album” album on this list, as Withers’ albums are kind of like The Tree of Life: About everything you can possibly think of. But the centerpiece of this album is “The Same Love That Made Me Laugh,” a bluesy, sweeping track that is about how the person who he loved is now hurting him. The rest of the album has moments of marital strife (“Can We Pretend,” “Make a Smile,” and “Heartbreak Road”) and ends with Withers hitting the proverbial road. If it weren’t for the final album on this list, it’d be R&B’s defining divorce album.

Willie Nelson, Phases and Stages

Depending on if you count the first ever concept album—Frank Sinatra’s In the Wee Small Hours—as a divorce album (I do not, it’s mostly about his ex-lovers, not his ex-wife), Willie Nelson’s Phases and Stages is the first divorce concept album. The first side of the album is devoted to the point of view from the woman in the relationship—who we assume is Willie’s ex-wife, as he had recently divorced after she sewed him into his bedsheets and beat him with a broom for being a cheater—and the second side is devoted to the man. The woman tells of being unappreciated, of doing laundry and washing the floor, her only reward a two-timer who comes home with lipstick on his shirt. The man’s side tells of being finally free of his marriage, but also realizing he’s lonely and was stupid to throw his wife overboard. It’s one of Willie’s three best LPs, and one filled with small moments of reflection and devastation.

Adele, 30 and Kacey Musgraves, star-crossed

Two modern additions to the divorce cannon, these albums come at modern divorce from different angles. Adele is largely concerned with how the divorce will harm her son (“Easy on Me”), while Musgraves recounts that her husband could never deal with being less famous than her (“Breadwinner”). Modern divorce is more common, but it still leads to great art.  

Fleetwood Mac, Rumours

If you discount the Nicks and Buckingham songs—still the most devasting breakup songs in the classic rock canon—the four Christine McVie songs on Rumours are like their own little divorce mini-album. “Don’t Stop” is her telling her ex-husband—the Mac in Fleetwood Mac,  John McVie—to keep living his life without her. “Oh Daddy” is her writing about a different Fleetwood Mac divorce—drummer Mick Fleetwood’s—and “The Chain” is Buckingham, Nicks and McVie connecting to write a combo divorce/breakup track. And then, to add insult to injury, she has “You Make Lovin’ Fun,” a song devoted to her new lover, the band’s lighting guy. Fleetwood Mac was like a one-band season of Couples Therapy, and they own any list devoted to breakups, divorce, or drug use.

Cursive, Domestica

The defining divorce album of the punk/emo genre, Domestica is a concept album about a divorce between two characters—called “Sweetie” and “Pretty Baby”—and the crushing domestic expectations that lead to their relationship’s explosion. Cursive frontman Tim Kasher broke up Cursive in 1998 when he got married; by 1999 Cursive were in the studio cutting this album, and have been around more or less since. Marriages might come and go, but Cursive are forever.   

Marvin Gaye, Here, My Dear

We end this Hall of Fame of Divorce with the single pettiest divorce album of all time. For much of his ascent on the Motown label—from his early hits like “Can I Get a Witness” and “Heard it Through the Grapevine” to his creative breakthrough What’s Going On—Marvin Gaye was married to Anna Gordy, the sister of Motown president/entertainment mega mogul Berry Gordy. It was an oft-fraught relationship, complicated by their age gap—she was 17 years his senior—and by the inter-office politics of being married to the boss’s sister. When they finally divorced in the late ‘70s, Anna—who’d been an equity partner in Motown itself—had a much better attorney than Marvin, and went after him hard; he had cheated often, and she knew how much money he really had.

Their divorce proceedings lasted across 1975-1978, essentially stalling Marvin’s career as he struggled to do much more than an occasional brief tour for money.  In a bid to keep as many of his What’s Going On income his own, his lawyer came up with something interesting: As a divorce settlement, half of Gaye’s earnings/publishing/and royalties from his next album would be, in perpetuity, Anna’s. Given that it’d been a while since his last studio album—I Want You was his only LP of the previous five years—Anna figured that she’d be in for a windfall.

Gaye had a final evil masterstroke to deliver, though: He called the album Here, My Dear, and devoted the album to their divorce. Instead of the sly, sensual R&B of his previous few LPs, Gaye was angry, sad, despondent, and the album reflected that. The centerpiece is “When Did You Stop Loving Me, When Did I Stop Loving You,” a song that does not hide its lyrics from the title on down. He basically invented petty R&B, giving many generations of artists a mold to fit.  

The album was a commercial dud, but in the long game, Anna might have come up ok: The album is revered as one of Gaye’s best, routinely on lists of Best Albums of All Time, even if it didn’t sell well in 1978 or 1979.

There are other divorce albums, but none of them have royalties tied to a divorce settlement. At least that we know of.    

--Andrew Winistorfer