My favorite band broke up last week.

I found out rather randomly – through a retweet of a friend of someone I follow. ¹

Perhaps it’s fitting I found out about about The Weakerthans in a rather random fashion in the first place. I was a sorta part-time music reviewer for the paper where I worked. I’d get piles of review CDs and would spin them to see if anything struck my fancy.

Reconstruction Site did. I wrote a glowing review. Not that I was expecting much to come of it. I wasn’t exactly a star-maker.

Rather, the Weakerthans felt like a private little fan cult. Occasionally I’d see Reconstruction Site in someone’s CD rack. Turns out some of my close friends also were into the band.

Somehow a small fan circle makes a band seem more special, as if they are more your own band, something that Matchbox Twenty buying masses would never like.

For those uninitiated, the band was a Canadian foursome fronted by John K. Sampson, former Propaghandi member. However, he comes off as such a thoughtful, gentle spirit that it’s hard to wonder how he fit in there.

The Weakerthans combined a clean-alt-rock jangly guitar sound with Sampson’s bone dry vocals and elegantly literate lyrics.

They were equally at home with driving guitar riffs on Aside, the bleak Hymn of the Medical Oddity or the upbeat country rocker A New Name for Everything.

But mainly they were the master of the character song, the tale of a sad and lonesome oddball or outsider facing a moment of clarity.

Their lyrics found tragedy in the silly and everyday mundane – a cat concerned for its depressed owner, Bigfoot wondering if people really believe he exists, Ernest Shackleton longing for his Antarctica heyday, or a young worker at an Internet startup recounting his firing to an acquaintance and ending with a plaintive “I know we haven’t talked in a while, but could you come get me?.”

This astounding sadness was typically hidden in an upbeat melody and perky rhythm track, perhaps none more so than Benediction, a list of failures “sick with simple math and shy discoveries, piled up against our impending defeat.”

Inevitable decline and inability to connect were a favorite theme. Some might call them fatalistic.

Civil Twilight, opener to their final studio album, Reunion Tour finds a bus driver on his route passing the house where he and his girlfriend used to live. He wonders if the landlord fixed the cracked wall he stared at she told him she had to go.

He recalls the moment and comes to a crushing realization:

My chance to say something Seemed so brief but it wasn’t Now I know I had plenty of time Between the sunset and certified darkness

Just like that hapless bus driver, once the shock wears off, we realize the band’s breakup had been coming for some time.

The title track to Reunion Tour winds down their their now-final album with a vivid picture of a roadie packing up after a show, “rolling cables slick with beer” and cleaning up as “the plastic cups clapped beneath our tender sleepy brooms.”

Their only album released since Reunion Tour in 2007 was a live album, Live at the Burton Cummings Theatre. An ominous sign since those are so often contract fullfillers.

When a band breaks up, disappointment comes from what fans believe could have been, a lost hope of more albums to love as much as previous ones.

Sometimes that’s how it works out, sometimes not.

Artistic endeavors have a way of soldiering on far too long. ² U2 stopped making listenable music years ago. It’s just product from U2 Inc. R.E.M. hung in about a decade too long. The Rolling Stones encased themselves in amber in 1973 and their tours are just a geriatric ward on wheels.

For the Weakerthans, there will be no slow decline, no feeling of a guest who lingered uncomfortably long after the party was over. ³

What we have is two masterpieces, two near-perfect albums and fine live album. A bit of sun in an empty room.

1. Whether finding out about something via Twitter is actually random is another matter.
2. At the time, All That You Can’t Leave Behind seemed like a return to form, but in retrospect it was just a retrenchment ahead of a lengthy decline.
3. Like me, for instance.