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Four years on from Wham!’s "Careless Whisper", 1988’s "Teardrops" provided not only the decade’s other, superior take on the pitfalls of infidelity, but also its best argument for pop powered by restraint rather than excess. The underlying message may be the same—guilty feet ain’t got no rhythm—but "Teardrops" swaps desperation for quiet resignation, and impassioned chest-beating for melancholy understatement and resilience; the music may no longer feel the same, but Linda Womack tries to keep dancing. "Nothing that I do or feel ever feels like I felt it with you," she announces with such understated dignity that her sadness feels more real, more intimate than almost any other vision of heartbreak in pop’s archives.



Womack & Womack had already proved themselves expert in mining these spaces in between breakups and make-ups, intermingling love and loss so expertly and so effortlessly that the sadness becomes soothing, a crutch you can’t throw away, a lover you can’t leave no matter how badly you fight. If 1983’s Love Wars is the duo’s finest album-length expression of this mission, then "Teardrops" is the ultimate single-shot, a simmering soul number of such polite, warm accommodation that it raises the notion of "background music" to the level of art, demanding not to be turned up, but that we turn the sound of life down in order to hear it better.



Linda takes care to fill only so much space as she needs to vocalize her bittersweet nostalgia, while the arrangement shrugs off her despond with a brisk yet comfortable groove that remembers the ease and familiarity of romance lost in the moment, taking for granted the spontaneous joy now forever denied to its singer. In wistful instrumental stretches the song slides into an extended keyboard solo of unexpected (even for Womack & Womack) minimalism and economy, a slow jazzstep in zero gravity. Its radical uneventfulness captures better than words the song’s fond evocation of love’s smallest scenes of domestic harmony: burnt toast or unmade beds or footsteps on the dancefloor. —Tim Finney



See also: Womack & Womack: "Baby I'm Scared of You"