Music for the Morning After: An Exclusive Valentine's Mixtape From Us to You

Valentine's Day ends. The day after begins. The music for the morning after is different from the music for the occasion.

The morning-after music is quieter. It doesn't need to perform anything. The people in the room, if there are people in the room, are past the romantic performance of the holiday and into something more ordinary and therefore more true. The music for this moment is the music that acknowledges the morning as it actually is rather than as it should be.

The folk and country tradition is full of this music. The quieter songs. The ones that don't require the occasion.

The morning-after selection

John Prine — "In Spite of Ourselves" Prine and Iris DeMent singing together, the song that celebrates love not as an ideal but as two specific people with specific faults who choose each other anyway. The most accurate love song in the catalog.

Gillian Welch — "Look at Miss Ohio" The ambivalence song. The person in the song wants what she has and also wants to be free of it. Both things at once. The morning after is often both things at once.

Bill Callahan — "Jim Cain" The opening track from Sometimes I Wish We Were an Eagle, the most beautiful voice in American music making a complicated case about memory and time.

Emmylou Harris — "Two More Bottles of Wine" The morning-after song from a different angle. The relationship is over, the narrator has accepted it, life continues. The acceptance is hard to argue with.

Bonnie Raitt — "I Can't Make You Love Me" The definitive statement of its subject. There is nothing to argue with in this song. It just says what it says.

Nick Drake — "Pink Moon" Not strictly American folk, but the morning-after quality is absolute. The solo guitar, the voice, the two minutes and eight seconds of something irreducibly true.

Townes Van Zandt — "Waiting Around to Die" Not a morning-after song in the romantic sense, but a morning-after song in the existential sense: what happens after you stop expecting things to be different from what they are.

John Hartford — "Gentle on My Mind" The freedom song. The relationship that exists without possession. The cleanest statement of what love without ownership might look like.

Bob Dylan — "To Make You Feel My Love" The Adele version has temporarily obscured this recording. The Dylan version is quieter and therefore more accurate to the morning.

Iris DeMent — "After You're Gone" The closing track. The acknowledgment that even in the presence of love, you know it will not last forever. The morning after is, among other things, the recognition of this fact.

Morning Mixtapes here.