Love Is Blindness (The Great Gatsby)

Jack White strips the original down to something rawer and more wounded than Bono ever let the song be, replacing the ambient shimmer of the source recording with guitar playing that sounds like tearing something open. The production is dark and swamp-heavy, all low rumble and sudden violent runs that feel like someone losing control and then catching themselves and then losing it again. The voice carries a particular quality of recklessness barely contained — he sounds like he's been awake for three days, like the words cost something real to say. The song meditates on love as destruction, as the willing surrender of clear sight in exchange for connection, but in White's hands it's less resignation than accusation, directed outward and inward simultaneously. There's a guitar solo toward the end that functions more like a scream than a musical statement — technically precise and emotionally demolished at the same time, those two states somehow inseparable. In the film it scores the collapse of the dream, the moment when the beautiful fiction of the summer finally breaks. You'd reach for this late at night when a relationship has cost you something you can feel the shape of its absence, when you understand precisely the thing you chose and chose it anyway.