—”Love will abide, take things in stride / Sounds like good advice, but there’s no one at my side.” — Linda Ronstadt, “Long, Long Time” (1970)

Opening: The Ghost of Sunday

Sunday arrives like a ghost you half-invited. I play Long, Long Time again, this time with you in the room. We let silence gather around that first, trembling piano chord. The song doesn’t ask permission. It just reopens the wound, just enough that you remember your own.

We’re not doing this because we want to heal. We’re doing this because in America, we rarely allow longing to linger. Everything here is built to move on, to refresh, to scroll away. But this song, this old, aching relic from 1970, doesn’t move on. It stays.

There is something profoundly American about this refusal to forget. The same nation that built its myth on motion, on reinvention, also carries within it a secret ache. A permanent ghost of the almost, the nearly, the might-have-been. Long, Long Time belongs to that shadow.

The Architecture of Vulnerability

Linda Ronstadt didn’t perform vulnerability on that track; she inhabited it. Her voice trembles not from affectation, but from permission. There’s no catharsis waiting in the final chorus. No resolution. Just the sound of someone learning to live alongside a memory. A song that doesn’t end so much as evaporate.

The resurgence of the song in 2023, through its devastating use in The Last of Us, wasn’t some fluke of retro nostalgia. It was recognition. After the episode aired, streams of the original Ronstadt version soared nearly 5,000%, according to Spotify. Not because people wanted to remember the past, but because they needed permission to feel something in the present.

In a culture that metabolizes tragedy into content and pain into memes, the endurance of Long, Long Time stands as a quiet refusal. It says: No. Sit with this. Don’t explain it away. Don’t swipe past. Just feel it.

And isn’t that what these songs offer? A place to feel, uninterrupted. No skip button. No app analytics. Just raw, inconvenient memory. The kind that doesn’t fit in a post, or a caption, or a dating profile.

Songs of Waiting and Leaving

Ronstadt’s catalogue is a treasure chest of emotional endurance. Her cover of “When Will I Be Loved?” asks a question we’ve all whispered at some point, even if only in the privacy of our worst nights. Originally sung by the Everly Brothers in 1960, Ronstadt’s 1975 version trades in their smooth certainty for something more desperate, more haunted. In her voice, the question isn’t rhetorical. It’s cellular.

When will I be loved? It’s the child’s question, the widow’s question, the voteless citizen’s question. It’s the sound of waiting for something you’re not even sure you’re allowed to want anymore. Ronstadt doesn’t belt it out; she leans into it. The yearning is there, yes, but so is exhaustion. This is what it sounds like when hope grows callouses.

And then there’s “Different Drum,” that sly rebellion wrapped in velvet. Before she was the vocal hurricane of “Long, Long Time,” Ronstadt gave us the perfect exit strategy. “You and I travel to the beat of a different drum,” she sang, almost kindly. A breakup song with no villain, just two people refusing to disappear into each other.

The song, written by Michael Nesmith, is a subtle marvel of emotional complexity. It doesn’t rage or plead. It accepts. And in that acceptance, it reclaims dignity. We don’t write love songs like that anymore. We’re too busy branding our heartbreak or airbrushing it into empowerment. But Ronstadt let it remain ambiguous, even unresolved. You can love someone and still leave. You can leave someone and still love.

The Mask and the Tear

That ambiguity lives, too, in Smokey Robinson’s “The Tracks of My Tears.” A smile stretched over a fracture. The party guest who laughs a little too loudly. We all know that feeling. The performance of healing. But the genius of that song is in what it withholds. It doesn’t ask you to cry. It just lets you know that someone else still does.

The song was released in 1965, during an era when emotional restraint was seen as virtue, especially for men. Robinson’s falsetto was radical in its tenderness. It cracked open an emotional vocabulary that black male artists were rarely allowed to explore in public. The brilliance wasn’t just in the melody, but in the mask. The ability to articulate heartbreak without unmasking completely.

The Geography of Heartbreak

All these songs remind us that heartbreak isn’t just an emotion. It’s a geography. You live in it. You learn its back roads and empty diners. Its late-night radio stations. And for many of us, the playlist is the map.

Science can tell us that heartbreak lights up the same neural circuits as physical pain. That dopamine, oxytocin, and cortisol conspire to keep us addicted to people long after they’ve gone. That our prefrontal cortex goes to war with our limbic system in the middle of the night. But those are just the diagnostics. The cure, if there is one, lives in the music.

These songs don’t heal in the pharmaceutical sense. They don’t erase the wound. But they offer witness. They accompany. They say, simply, You’re not the only one.

The Algorithm of Forgetting

When the algorithm tells you to “move on,” when your friends gently suggest it’s time to “get back out there,” these songs say: Or don’t. Feel it a little longer. Stay here, in the ache. There’s beauty in not closing the wound too quickly.

We live in a country that erases its emotions almost as quickly as it manufactures them. Ghosting has become etiquette. Grief is an inconvenience. We curate our digital selves to appear always okay. But beneath the curated joy, the ache still pulses.

To play Long, Long Time in 2025 is to perform emotional resistance. To let the song breathe in your living room is a quiet kind of protest. Because the algorithm doesn’t know what to do with that kind of duration. It doesn’t know how to monetize longing that goes nowhere.

And yet, here we are. Still pressing play.

The Communion of Ache

So tonight, maybe do it again. Put on Long, Long Time. Then follow it with When Will I Be Loved?, Different Drum, and Tracks of My Tears. Let them bleed into each other. Let your heart expand and contract. Let the ache shape you.

It won’t vanish. But it might become bearable. It might become beautiful. It might become yours.

And when the last note fades, don’t be surprised if your heart is still there, quietly beating.

That, that is the beginning.