Broken Social Scene / The Time Traveler's Wife (Music from the Motion Picture) / 2009
Love Will Tear Us Apart
weary, aching resignation shot through with tenderness
This is Broken Social Scene's rendition of Joy Division's 1980 classic, recorded for the soundtrack of The Time Traveler's Wife, a film about a relationship warped by time and separation. The lyric documents a couple whose intimacy has curdled into routine and mutual exhaustion, with the title phrase arriving as both diagnosis and inevitability.
romantic disintegration emotional stasis guilt and self-recrimination the corrosiveness of routine fatalism
Who's speaking
A first-person narrator addressing a partner directly, cataloguing the small failures and silences that have accumulated between them; the voice is self-implicating rather than accusatory, admitting doubt about his own conduct as much as hers.
What happens
The song moves from a general diagnosis of a relationship gone stale, through specific, almost domestic details of physical and emotional distance, to a final admission of personal collapse. It doesn't resolve; it ends where it began, repeating the same fatalistic refrain, suggesting the couple is caught in a loop rather than moving toward any conclusion.
How it's built
Three verses of increasing intimacy and specificity are each followed by the same two-line refrain, functioning almost like a chorus that never develops or escalates musically the way the lyric's emotional content does. The final section drops the verse/refrain alternation and simply repeats the hook three times, letting repetition itself enact the exhaustion and inevitability the words describe.
Section by section
Opening verse
The song opens with abstractions — routine, ambition, resentment — laid out almost like symptoms in a diagnosis. There's no scene-setting, no image of the couple themselves yet; instead the narrator names the forces working against them before naming the people. The verse ends on the idea of diverging paths, setting up the refrain as a kind of grim conclusion rather than a surprise.
First refrain
The title phrase, repeated twice, functions as the emotional center of gravity for the whole song. Its plainness is part of its power: no metaphor, no ornament, just a flat statement offered as fact.
Second verse
“Why is the bedroom so cold?”
Here the lyric moves from abstraction to a concrete physical image, using bodily distance as shorthand for emotional distance. The questions that follow — about timing, about respect — read as genuine uncertainty rather than accusation, and the admission that some appeal still lingers complicates any easy reading of total estrangement.
Third verse
The narrator turns the lens on himself, admitting to failure and creeping desperation. The mention of not being able to function anymore marks the clearest sign of personal breakdown in the song, tipping the balance from mutual drift toward individual collapse.
Closing repetition
By stripping away the verses and simply cycling the refrain three times, the arrangement enacts the very stasis the lyric describes — there is no bridge, no resolution, just the same sentence recurring, as if the couple (or the narrator alone) is trapped inside it.
Craft
- personification
- Abstract nouns like routine, ambition, and resentment are given active verbs — biting, riding high — which turns internal emotional decay into something almost external and aggressive, as if happening to the couple rather than caused by them.
- rhetorical questioning
- The middle sections shift into direct questions about coldness, timing, and crying, which stages the narrator's uncertainty and guilt rather than asserting blame outright.
- refrain as inevitability
- The repeated title line functions less as a chorus hook and more as a mantra of doom; its unchanging wording across the song mirrors the stuckness the lyric describes.
- understatement
- Devastating admissions (a failing marriage, sleepless nights, functional collapse) are delivered in flat, conversational language rather than heightened imagery, which intensifies the sense of numb resignation.
Reading it
The most direct reading treats this as a portrait of a relationship dying of attrition rather than betrayal — worn down by routine and unspoken resentment until affection can no longer sustain it, even though some pull between the two people remains. A secondary reading, invited by its use on The Time Traveler's Wife soundtrack, hears the song less as marital breakdown and more as a meditation on how forces outside a couple's control (time, circumstance, illness, absence) can tear love apart regardless of how much affection survives — the title's fatalism reframed as something closer to fate than failure.
Context
The lyric originates with Joy Division; Ian Curtis wrote it, and it was released in 1980 shortly before his death, widely read afterward through the lens of his marriage and mental health, though that biographical reading remains inference rather than fact. Broken Social Scene's version, made for The Time Traveler's Wife film, repurposes the song outside its original post-punk context, likely leaning into its more atmospheric, aching qualities to suit a film about love disrupted by uncontrollable circumstance rather than ordinary marital decay.
Listen for
- how the refrain's wording never changes even as the surrounding verses grow more specific and personal
- the shift from external, abstract causes of failure in the first verse to internal, physical detail in the second
- the moment the narrator turns his self-examination toward outright admission of collapse near the end
- the way the song ends on pure repetition instead of resolution, mirroring the stuckness of the relationship
About Broken Social Scene
Broken Social Scene is a Canadian indie rock band and musical collective including as few as six and as many as nineteen members, formed by Kevin Drew and Brendan Canning in 1999. Alongside Drew and Canning, the other core members of the band are Justin Peroff (drums), Andrew Whiteman (guitar) and Charles Spearin (guitar).
1999 - present / Canada
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