On “Separate Ways (Worlds Apart)” by Journey, and The Act of Yelling While Sad by chris ritter

One day during my first year of high school, I heard that my friend Sam broke up with his girlfriend of over a year by giving her a mix CD with one song on it. That song was “Separate Ways (Worlds Apart)” by Journey. The day I found out, I (reasonably) thought this was psycho behavior. In the years since, (maybe unreasonably) it became one of my favorite things anyone had ever done.
Not to sound old, or to say the least, but I’ll do both by saying it–back then, dating was different. Real different. Ten years ago at Rockbridge County High School, the only high school in the western Virginia county where I grew up, there were people who were dating. Then, there were people who were not dating, but who danced close together at homecoming or prom and no one was surprised at this because they were “talking,” or perhaps close to beginning to be talking. Ah, yes, the talking stage. There was that, too. Also, there were people who hooked up or kissed exactly once at a New Year’s party or at a barn party or in a friend’s basement after too many Busch Lights which were procured from the gas station guy who didn’t card and it was kind of weird between them for a month or so after it happened but since there is no disappearing from each other in a western Virginia county where there is only one high school, they eventually became friends again. Ghosting was impossible. There were things akin to “situationships,” but that word had not been invented yet. Nothing made sense. And yet, there were rules, norms, expectations. So everything did.
This is to say that, at first, when I heard that Sam broke up with Jennifer (I’m using pseudonyms to protect both of their romantic futures) with the “Separate Ways” mix CD, I was flummoxed. 
How dare he? Sam was my ride or die, but this I would neither ride nor die for. Back then, the biggest debate over how to leave a lover was whether it was morally defensible to break up over text or a phone call. But Sam and I, we were men of morals. When we were forced to break the heart of another (for me, only an imagined circumstance), we made sure we did it to their face, because that is the Thing That Good People Do. But to end a relationship—a serious one!—in-person, soundtracked by the song “Separate Ways (Worlds Apart)” by Journey, this was all too much.

*

I listen to a lot of sad music. My boss at the bakery where I work won’t let me play music there because she’s afraid I will depress our customers with my preferred genre of “pop music made by sad women”—her words, but yes, accurate. A different boss once stole the aux from me at the gym where I used to work after listening to 20 seconds of “Garden Song” by Phoebe Bridgers. He asked me if it got “significantly more upbeat, eventually.” No, no it does not, Austin. Skip.
But when I, with my supposed iron stomach for sadness, try to think of the saddest song I've ever heard, my mind goes to that CD that Sam gave Jennifer, and the one song I couldn’t believe was on it. 
More specifically, it goes to the song’s music video. For the uninitiated, the now infamous video for “Separate Ways” came out in 1983 and features the members of Journey, for some reason on a wharf in New Orleans, air-playing their instruments while lead-singer Steve Perry runs around wailing to high heaven. While this is happening, a woman walks by, trying her damnedest to ignore the whole thing. It’s ridiculous. It’s a hundred miles over the top. What is that keyboard doing up there? 
MTV called the video for “Separate Ways” the 13th worst music video of all time. Perry, to his credit, didn’t want to make it in the first place. Jonathan Cain, Journey’s keyboardist and a primary songwriter on “Separate Ways,” has said he is “at a loss to explain that video.” Adam Dubin, who is a director of music videos but clearly not this one, said that “the director should be shot.” Even in an era known for maximalism, the “Separate Ways” video was doing too much. In the most generous of worlds, we might call it camp. 
But somehow, for this song, for this band, it fits, because the song is over the top wild, too. Sure, breakups are devastating and dramatic. But have they ever felt this, I don't know, like Mission: Impossible? That is the kind of drama the dark power chords and eerie synths of “Separate Ways” bring. Action-thriller drama. Life or death drama. There is a violence to our emotions, and “Separate Ways” invites it. This is a song about a breakup that has also worked for the final scene of an episode of Stranger Things, in which a group of children are preparing to fight monsters from a parallel universe and possibly die.
I do not remember the first time I heard “Separate Ways,” but I do know it played frequently on the local radio station that played at the Lexington City Pool, the public pool down the road from where I grew up. There, the pool staff blasted 99.1 FM, which played “the very best of the 80s, 90s, and today!” Kids ran under the big green mushroom waterfall and adults swam laps, bobbing their heads in and out of the water between bits of Uncle Kracker, Shania Twain, and P!nk. Then, “Separate Ways” would come on. Not that “Separate Ways” is necessarily a vibe killer, but it certainly steam rolls its own vibe into the venue, leaving any previously existing vibe dead in its wake. “Separate Ways” turns a sunny afternoon at the pool into a tense hellscape, a place where danger lurks in every corner, where no pool noodle-wielding child is safe. Ok, so maybe it is a vibe killer, at least when the vibe it follows is that of “Smile” by Uncle Kracker.
And yet, this is a song about sadness, hope after sadness, and moving on. Someday love will find you, opens the chorus, Perry yelling it like he needs the sound to cross an ocean. Those chains that bind you? Break them! Perry is sad things didn’t work out, but he still loves his former partner, he knows they’ll find another love someday, and he needs his former partner to know it, too. This message is why, I’m guessing, Sam chose this song for his breakup mixtape. 
What’s more, years later, when I ask Jennifer about that mixtape, I find out I have the story wrong. There were other songs on the CD, too–songs that recounted memories of their relationship with less melodrama and less yelling. The one-song mixtape story, it seemed, was nothing more than a product of our school’s ruthless rumor mill. What I thought initially to be insane was actually kind of sweet– “Separate Ways” was included mainly as a joke, a last gag between partners on their way to becoming good friends. For that, it almost fits. On paper, “Separate Ways” is hopeful, caring, sweet even.
But songs don’t live on paper—they live in sound. And it didn’t make sense to me that these emotions should sound so dangerous.
It’s not that I didn’t know heartbreak and the horrid grab bag of emotions that comes with it, but the heartbroken voices that resonated with me were gentler ones. Bon Iver, Frank Ocean, Blood Orange, Tame Impala—when I was heartbroken in high school, this was the music I turned to. Strange, wispy, sad, and, usually, soft. I self-isolated. When sad, I would wrap myself in a blanket and drift off to sleep on the living room couch with headphones on, or drive a long way out VA Route 39, and listen, letting the voices of people like Dev Hynes and Kevin Parker lift me off to some place else. I wanted my feelings to be cooed, whispered, and falsetto-d away while I remained quiet.
It wasn’t always this way. As a child, I yelled. 
My preferred venue for sad yelling was the baseball diamond, or basketball court, or whatever site for a little league sporting event where I would, inevitably, yell at the umpire or referee. Every call against me was a tragedy. Every ball, every strike, every foul, every alleged transgression by another player that went unnoticed—all of these were slights to my humanity. Or at least, something to yell about. To yell at them about. When I try to remember what exactly  it was that I yelled at these poor underpaid saints who worked for the Rockbridge Area Recreational Organization, I can’t remember any words, only that I yelled them. I was known for this. I was bad enough that my basketball coach asked me after most games if what he had just seen was “how I wanted to represent my family.” I was bad enough that, to this day, when I am home for the holidays and I see those former officials in my hometown Kroger, I cower into the aisles. They certainly would not recognize me today, nearly twenty years later. I doubt they remember me, but I can picture their faces vividly.
Was I angry at them? For all those fouls, for all those no-calls? Sure I was. But the yelling—that outsized reaction which suggests something deeper than what is happening in front of the eyes—came from sadness. Sadness that I wasn’t better at sports. Sadness that I wasn’t as cool or as skinny or as talented as the other boys in my grade. Sadness, perhaps, that I wasn’t having to decide whether or not to break someone’s heart over text or in-person. For this, I yelled, making my catastrophic feelings sound like a catastrophe.
That is the trick of “Separate Ways” too. So often, we think of sadness as a quiet emotion, and anger and ecstasy as loud ones. But in the world of “Separate Ways,” yelling is an accepted method of releasing sadness. Heartbreak comes in many forms, and so does healing from it. Sometimes, heartbreak feels like a part of you quietly withering away, and sometimes it feels like a loud, destructive force—one that requires something equally destructive to heal. I had forgotten that.
Maybe that’s why when I listen to “Separate Ways” now, I feel something. I still laugh every time I hear the song, because picturing anyone doing any normal thing—gardening, cooking, folding laundry—to “Separate Ways” is hilarious. But when I stop picturing myself listening to “Separate Ways” and start actually listening to “Separate Ways,” it clicks. From the outside, it makes no sense, but on the interior, our emotions do what they do whether they make sense or not. The crush on that person who sucks, the breakup that came out of nowhere, the feeling that love will never find you, no matter how hard you try—we've all had those feelings that would never hold up in a court of law. But they keep our nights sleepless anyway, because at the root of those feelings, there is a sadness so intense that it defies reason, so intense it feels like life or death in the moment, so intense it feels violent, like it needs to be yelled.

*

Last year, on Christmas Eve, I get a text from Sam after not hearing from him in over a year. 
He wants to know if I’m in town, and if I’m free that night. 
I am in town, and I am in fact not free the night of Christmas Eve due to standing family plans, but before I can tell him this, Sam tells me that he is proposing to his girlfriend Amanda that night and needs a last-minute engagement photographer. I tell him my plans have been cancelled.
At Hopkins Green, the tiny park at the center of town, I am struck by how quiet it is. It’s 4 PM on Christmas Eve, the streets are empty, and the overcast day has a dim glow from the lights and ribbons on the park fence. The quiet feels right, logical. It is perfect in a way few things are. I hide behind the park’s colossal Christmas tree while Sam and Amanda enter the park.
After it happens, I expect loudness. I expect screams, big laughs, and other sounds of joy that cut through the nearly silent night. This is the kind of person Sam is—loud, zany, uncontainable. But that’s not what happens. What does happen is no less joyful, but much less noisy. They take each other in their arms. They speak quietly. I can’t hear what they say, but I can see their smiles. Big smiles. Then, when they spot the paparazzi coming out from behind a Christmas tree, they laugh their big laughs.
There is no right or wrong volume at which to feel. Sometimes love is silent and joyful, and sometimes heartbreak is silly and loud. Sometimes sadness requires air guitars and wailing on a wharf in Louisiana. At others, it requires ethereal whispers playing from a car speaker while driving a road that lovingly winds you back into place. Sometimes ecstasy requires shouting from a rooftop. At others, on cloudy Christmas Eves lit by string lights and street lamps, it requires no sound at all. Our methods for releasing emotion can feel far apart, worlds apart. But yell it from the wharf—they are always worth it.

Chris Ritter is a writer, photographer, and musician from Lexington, Virginia. His work, which focuses on the connection between art and place, has been featured by NPR, Genius, and Condé Nast Traveler. He records music under the name Nodding Terms.