"OK Google, play me songs of love and loss"

Facebook knows you’re pregnant before you’re pregnant.

Spotify is in on this game.

Yesterday I hit “shuffle” on my Spotify “Discover Weekly” playlist, and the first three songs it played were:

• The Book Of Love, Peter Gabriel
• You Can’t Rush Your Healing, Trevor Hall
• Only You, Jimi Charles Moody

Now all credit to Spotify: I had been playing covers of I Think It’s Going to Rain Today on rotation for a few days, sending up a fairly obvious signal flare.

But really, Spotify robots, you play me a song with this as the chorus:

So, you can’t rush your healing
Darkness has its teachings
Love is never leaving
You can’t rush your healing
Your healing

Fortunately, I’ve arrived at a place where descending into a torrent of tears, or some variation thereof, seems like a pretty healthy thing to be doing. So a hat-tip to the robots.

Also, The Book of Love is an amazing song, especially the Peter Gabriel cover.

And from there it’s a short hop, skip and jump to The Power of the Heart, which Lou Reed wrote for Laurie Anderson as a marriage proposal and Peter Gabriel also covered.

You looked at me, I looked at you
Your sleeping heart was shining through
Wispy cobwebs that we’re breathing through
The power of the heart

That’s not such a bad place to dwell.