Five-song love story

Watever else they might have had and whatever they might have lacked, they had music. He made her mixtapes; she gave him albums. They couldn’t understand people for whom music was not a big deal, one way or another, but being liner-note-studying, alternate-version-hunting, interview-reading obsessives together didn’t guarantee they understood each other half the time, either.

5. Christopher Cross feat. Tina Fey, Lemon’s Theme. At the end of everything, they had this song, which she described as part joke, part earworm, and all cheese. Inspired by a Christopher Cross parody improvised by Fey’s character Liz Lemon on the TV show 30 Rock, it holds its own in the Cross easy-listening canon, with its saxophone solo and relentlessly sappy lyrics. He enjoyed it unironically, just as he had enjoyed watching Christopher Cross perform live in the Araneta Coliseum once (“Seriously, the man can shred”), and she was secretly touched by its inclusion on the last mix he ever gave her, while claiming later that it was the beginning of the end.

4. America, Work To Do. They found much to enjoy in the tune-stuffed Hugh Grant/Drew Barrymore 2007 rom-com Music and Lyrics, but aside from the playful ‘80s pastiches and the Britney-baiting dance-alongs, there was this, playing over the end credits: no less catchy, but much more clear-eyed about the requirements of a relationship. “Well, it’s a tough job,” the song starts off, a truth that the two of them knew only too well by that time. “And if we’re gonna make it, baby/ We’ve still got some work to do.”

3. The Pretenders, Don’t Get Me Wrong. They were in Baguio when she told him what her favorite song was. After suppressing his initial astonishment that she could even name a single, without-a-doubt, last-man-standing favorite song, he remarked that he had always found the song a little sad. “How is it sad?” she said, centimeters away from irritation. “‘I’m thinking about the fireworks that go off when you smile.’ How is that not happy happy joy joy time?” “Something in the song’s sound,” he said, admitting that he hadn’t really dissected the lyrics yet. Years later, she would wonder if he was not, after all, right.

2. R.E.M., At My Most Beautiful. The first mix he ever made for her, in the throes of fresh new love, included R.E.M.’s most wholeheartedly romantic song. As she would observe much later, “You pulled out the big guns, didn’t you?” Indebted beyond doubt to the Beach Boys, this was Stipe and Co. playing it straightforward, though not without a dash of self-aggrandizing wink-wink. It worked; the simplicity and sincerity of a line like “I found a way to make you smile” could not help but raise a smile in her as well, and the glimmers of what would be a handful of mostly happy years.

1. Rickie Lee Jones, Pirates (So Long, Lonely Avenue). He might not have appreciated right away what it meant for her to give him the 1981 album from which this song was spun off, but for her, it was important that he have it, considering the thoughts and feelings she had recently begun harboring. It was her desert island disc, her go-to for musical solace and endless surprise; in the wake of a bad breakup, it had somehow both bolstered and undermined a notion that she had been entertaining, that hope and love are very heavy words and that maybe it was okay to take a break from believing in them for a while.