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“All Too Well” by Taylor Swift. “Story of My Life” by One Direction. “Dreams” by Fleetwood Mac.

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����Certain songs are cursed

Listen to a few of the that survey respondents shared with Anthony Pinter, plus one of his own favorites.

"" by Taylor Swift (2021)

"" by the Miles Davis Quintet (1959)

"" by Frank Ocean (2016)

"" by CHVRCHES (2013)

"" by Los Campesinos! (2013)

Anthony Pinter, an information scientist at CU Boulder, wants to know: What is your breakup song?

“Everyone has a song,” said Pinter, assistant teaching professor in the ATLAS Institute. “I could play it for you right now, and it would take you back to a particular time in your life.”

Pinter is CU Boulder’s guru of breakups. He studies our modern digital identities, including how people manage their social media accounts after a breakup. Do they choose, for example, to delete all the photos of their ex from their Instagram? Or do they keep a few to commemorate that time in their lives?

Now, the researcher has inviting anyone to share their own breakup songs, and the memories and emotions they evoke. Pinter named the project Certain Songs are Cursed, a reference to a 2011 EP by the punk band Johnny Foreigner.

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He isn’t trying to resolve, once and for all, what the ultimate breakup song is, although he hopes to have people vote at some point. Instead, he wants to explore how peoples’ life experiences and memories can become bound together with music.

So far, Pinter’s survey has revealed that breakup songs can come in many different flavors. Entries include a lot of obvious culprits. (Think “Before He Cheats” by Carrie Underwood). But they also include ones that are less clear cut. One survey respondent, for example, listed “Alive with the Glory of Love” by pop-punk icons Say Anything—a song that follows the experiences of the lead singer’s grandparents during the Holocaust.

Ultimately, Pinter hopes his findings will inform new strategies that apps like Spotify or Apple Music could employ to help listeners navigate the tough months and years after a breakup—giving people more flexibility to decide what they listen to and when.

He sees the project as an exploration of what might be one of the most universal human experiences: heartbreak.

“In many ways, breakup songs are comforting,” Pinter said. “People may make playlists like that because they can find solace in the fact that someone else has had those same experiences.”

Seeing the end

For Pinter, the project came about, in part, because of his own, long-lasting love affair—in this case with the British emo band Los Campesinos! The group's songs capture themes of sadness and loss, often through the metaphor of soccer.

“You could listen to my music with me, and you’d think, ‘Wow, this person might not be OK,’” Pinter said. “I just love that music. It’s so important to me.”

He isn’t alone in that deep, emotional attachments to music. He noted that people often connect certain songs to important times in their lives—prompting powerful, sometimes even contradictory, emotions.

Currently, Pinter’s , which he created from responses to his survey, includes more than 170 entries. Surprising no one, perhaps, Taylor Swift earns the most spots on the list. But it also includes songs from R&B (“Ivy” by Frank Ocean), jazz (“It Never Entered My Mind” by the Miles Davis Quintet) and the indie scene (“Francis Forever” by Mitski).

To capture the complex emotions that music elicits, Pinter often talks about first dance songs—the ones that happy newlyweds play when they take their first dance as a married couple. At first, they may inspire joyful emotions. But after a divorce, hearing your first dance song can be devastating.

Not all breakup songs, however, prompt unhappy memories.

Pinter spoke to one survey respondent who played the song “Tether” by CHVRCHES non-stop after a traumatic breakup. The synth-pop song, which seemingly describes the end of a relationship, rises to a crescendo with the lead singer repeating the lyrics: “I’m feeling capable of seeing the end.”

“A couple years later, when he was talking to us, he said, ‘If I’m by myself driving and that song comes on, I’ll roll down the windows and crank it,’” Pinter said. “For that individual, it represented a moment of catharsis.”

We will flower again

Those complex emotions can make opening Spotify a minefield for people after a breakup, he added.

Spotify decides what music to play for you based on a series of algorithms.

“We can now point to the Spotify algorithm and say, ‘Why did you play this? You should know better,’” he said. “We can assign blame to a thing in a way we couldn’t if you’re just out at a bar, and someone puts a song on the jukebox.”

But preventing those kinds of auditory gut punches isn’t always easy. Spotify has a “mute” function that allows users to banish songs from their playlists. That doesn’t account for more complex relationships with music—say, people who want to hear a particular song, but only when they’re home alone and in a safe mental space.

Pinter noted that music apps could take some cues from social media platforms that have tried to provide users with more flexibility, albeit imperfectly. When users change their relationship status on Facebook, for example, they can choose to “take a break”—temporarily hiding posts from their exes while the emotions are still raw.

His own vote for the ultimate breakup song might go to “What Death Leaves Behind” by Los Campesinos! The song’s lyrics are a bittersweet ode to losing a relationship, but feeling hopeful about moving on and being happy again. (“We will flower again/I have surely seen it”).

“I think as I’ve gotten older on and settled into what feels like a stable relationship that my approach to breakup songs has shifted,” Pinter said. "I recognize that those past relationships have informed who I have become as a partner (and person, for that matter), and it is occasionally nice to be transported back to those moments as a reminder that I have grown because of them.”