Nevertheless, divorce has sometimes

Nevertheless, divorce has sometimes led to popular songs of the highest order, and as a music fan I can find much to admire in this most desperate of musical genres. Of course, breakup songs have been a staple of popular music forever, and most of them are trite and inconsequential. But occasionally someone gets it exactly right. The songs ring true in ways that have nothing to do with the hypothetical or the commercial, and that can only be based on real life: Bob Dylan imagining his ex-wife in bed with someone else in “You’re a Big Girl Now” and howling as only Bob Dylan can howl; Van Morrison, emotionally undone, staying up all night in a lonely diner in “Snow in San Anselmo”; Bruce Cockburn teetering between hate and his better Christian impulses in “You Get Bigger as You Go”; Richard Thompson uncorking a guitar solo in “Shoot Out the Lights” that is so full of rage and sorrow that it is breathtaking in its intensity.