An Analysis of “Your Ex-Lover” is Dead by Stars

If you were young and sad around the year 2004, you probably remember the song “Your Ex-Lover is Dead” by Stars. It’s a depressing love ballad, complete with violins and a duet between Amy Millan and Torquil Campbell that contains some of the most heart-wrenchingly devastating lyrics and sad indie rock. The song opens with a male voice proclaiming, “When there is nothing left to burn you have to set yourself on fire” and continues in a similar dramatic tone.

No stranger to unrequired love in my early twenties, I discovered the song when I burned someone else’s “Broken Heart Mix CD” onto my computer hard drive sometime around the year 2006. Every brief entanglement that fizzled before it could ever really begin has sent this song swinging back into heavy rotation on my playlist.

The truth is, who hasn’t had a relationship like that? Unrequited love is timeless, Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream features an entire cast of characters who are smitten with someone who shows them no affection whatsoever. And when you listen closely to the lyrics of “Your-Ex Lover Again,” the tragedy plays itself out with very little effort. He’s trying to remember her name while she is proclaiming that “It’s nothing but time and a face that you lose, I chose to feel it and you couldn’t choose.”

So, you take this scenario where two people happen across each other again and remember a relationship so differently, but “live through this, and you won’t look back.” The only consistency between the two is that neither of them wants to go back to it and that they are not sorry. It comes to the simplicity of the title: no matter how scarred you are by the past, your ex-lover is dead — maybe not literally, but you will never know this person the way that you thought you did.

When the song wraps up in the final verse (“There’s one thing I want to say so I’ll be brave, you were what I wanted, I gave what I gave. I’m not sorry I met you, I’m not sorry it’s over, I’m not sorry there’s nothing to save. I’m not sorry there’s nothing to save”), it comes to a place of peace and acceptance. After all, they don’t regret meeting one another.

And maybe that’s why so many of us aging sad-folks feel so at peace with this song.