In a market where singles were everything, it is remarkable that what may be Merle Haggard’s best song was never released as one, which has allowed it to escape too many anthologies. “Today I Started Loving You Again” occasionally gets confused with George Jones’ baroque-by-comparison “He Stopped Loving Her Today” – a hit twelve years later (and which tellingly took George two sessions months apart to get in the can) – but the comparison is still illuminating. Jones describes someone who had to die to get over a broken relationship; Haggard’s ostensibly still-living first person describes getting over a broken relationship all too thoroughly such that all of the jerry-rigged sanity-saving rationales evaporate without warning and leave him with all the same feelings he thought he had talked himself out of having. The backup is minimal, co-composer (and ex-wife) Bonnie Owens chimes in only on the last chorus, and Merle’s naked voice sounds ten years older than it was when he recorded it. It communicates that the truth he woke up to is one he can live with, but it also conveys the certainty that it is a truth he will now have to take to the grave.
Note: 25 secular essays (each one exactly 200 words long) about 25 songs, to appear one per day during Advent (or so) from Nov. 27 through Dec. 21.
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