Penny and The Quarters - You and Me

I watched Blue Valentine last night, and it totally fucking ruined one of my favorite songs, “You and Me”.  I was prepared for Blue Valentine to be a giant bummer, and it was, but I was unprepared for it to ruin one of my favorite songs.

You see—and this is a tiny bit of a spoiler, so you might want to stop reading—“You and Me” is Dean and Cindy’s song.  It’s played once, when they get together and are happy.  And it’s played again, when they are unsuccessfully trying to stop hating each other*, and it’s really damn sad.

I think I might get over it eventually—I hope so, because it’s such an awesome song—but I’m definitely never putting this on any lady-wooing mix cds.  What a bummer.

What’s goofy is that if you read the youtube comments for the song, it’s mostly people who saw Blue Valentine and fell in love with the song.  But I really don’t understand how anyone could walk away from that movie and think of “You and Me” as anything but the saddest of break-up songs.

And before you go praising Blue Valentine’s realism, you should know that it would have been impossible for Dean to play this for Cindy when they first met, as the recording wasn’t discovered until 2006, and wasn’t released until 2007.  The song has a pretty cool backstory: they still have no idea who recorded it.

*Actually, since the movie uses flashbacks, the when-they-got-together scene occurs later in the movie than the when-they-hate-each-other scene.  It wasn’t until the when-they-got-together scene that the song was ruined for me.