Ryan Adams - "Enemy Fire"

For this week's installment of "Songs of Pine," I thought I'd pick something that rocks a little. After all, we don't just deal with heartache by listening to sad, slow songs. Sometimes, you need something a little angrier. That was certainly the case with this Gold track, which was playing when I found out something devastating about an ex and then proceeded to play it over and over again as a coping device. (This did not help at all.)

It's too late, baby
Baby, it's too late

Was I trying to communicate that to her? Or was I trying to tell myself that? Regardless, I rarely listen to this song anymore. It still brings up ... not bad memories, per se. Just the memory of feeling bad.

Pearl Jam -"Black"

Continuing this month's "Songs of Pine" series, I will now acknowledge that, yes, at one embarrassing moment in my life, I was so heartbroken that I actually said to myself (to the woman who had made me so sad)...

I know someday you'll have a beautiful life 
I know you'll be a star 
In somebody else's sky 
But why 
Why 
Why can't it be 
Why can't it be mine?

Yup, those are lyrics from "Black," the emotional centerpiece of Pearl Jam's first album, Ten.

To this day, the song kinda makes me cringe because of just how nakedly earnest my feelings were in that moment. But I'll say this: Eddie Vedder was never a creep or a jerk in his lyrics. "Black" is a song about losing someone, about being left behind, but there's no misogyny or snottiness in his delivery. In the history of rock songs about dudes getting dumped, "All I taught her was everything" is pretty mild rancor. In other words, I feel embarrassed but not ashamed to have clung to this song in a vulnerable moment. Vedder is actually trying to be an honorable person while acknowledging how distraught he is. Many have expressed themselves in far uglier fashion under the same circumstances.

Elvis Costello and the Attractions - "Blue Chair"

For this week's "Songs of Pine," I've chosen a track off Blood & Chocolate, Elvis Costello's 1986 record that I gorged on while obsessing over not one but two women. What's especially fun about that scenario is that the songs really never lose their vitality; if you get tired of projecting the lyrics onto one person, hey, you can just switch to the other.

"Blue Chair" was the focal point, though. I still cannot fathom these lyrics, which actually made the song work even better. The snippets of coherence stung even more...

You say that your love lasts forever 
When you know the night is just hours

And wherever she is tonight
I want her anyway
I suppose she never said to you
You were just in the way

Now when I hear it, I think, "Oh right, I was going through a bad time then, huh?" I'm very grateful not to be sinking into the blue chair anymore.

Foo Fighters - "How I Miss You"

So, for no reason other than the fact that the idea came to me, I've decided that, in November, each week's Friday Video will be devoted to a song I've listened to on repeat while dealing with some sort of heartache. I'm calling this series "Songs of Pine." I'm sure this tour through my musical back pages won't be embarrassing at all.

First up: "How I Miss You," which was a Foo Fighters B-side from their 1995 self-titled debut. This is such an obvious mid-'90s alternative-rock track: quiet vocals, minimalist but tense arrangement and then, finally, an explosion of guitars and yells. This is how pining used to sound to me, as if that eruption of power chords was a way of letting all that pain and anguish out of my system. Hearing "How I Miss You" now kinda makes me cringe -- the song isn't even that great -- but the rawness of its misery (or was it my misery projected onto the song?) still stirs something deep in me.