The typical pop song doesn't like to take detours.

It targets our ears, our hearts, our legs and, in certain cases, our loins.

Although he usually comes to us from Anglo-Saxon countries, it's obvious that he's on first name terms, after all he's talking about our feelings.

He sings about his protagonists and, more often, his female protagonists just as confidentially – namely by their first names.

Whether it's Gloria, Layla, Mandy, Angie, Peggy Sue, Lucille, Valerie, Rosanna or Roxanne: it's almost always about love, about happy or unheard-of love, about universal feelings anyway, and adding surnames would only create unwanted distance.

Jorg Thomann

Editor in the “Life” section of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Sunday newspaper.

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The fact that someone's first and last name appears in a song, especially in its title, is a rarity and a sign that it wants to be more than a simple pop song, namely a story, and as so often in literature, it's dark to.

Three of pop's best-known signature songs speak of loneliness and broken dreams;

love, not even the unhappy one, has withdrawn and made way for approaching death.

Short tragedy in three stanzas

For example in "Eleanor Rigby", which Paul McCartney sings about as a representative of "all the lonely people".

A painfully beautiful short tragedy in three stanzas with a surreal touch from 1966, at the end of which poor Eleanor not only lost her life, no, not a single person appeared at her funeral.

The second song on the Revolver album, "Eleanor Rigby" is framed by "Taxman," George Harrison's litany about his heavy tax burden, and John Lennon's plea to please leave him alone ("I'm Only Sleeping") : a prelude that impressively demonstrated how long ago the Beatles' "She Loves You" days were.

“The Ballad of Lucy Jordan” is also steeped in bitterness.

At the age of 37, suburban housewife Lucy Jordan realizes that her wildly romantic dreams - driving a convertible through Paris, a multitude of passionate lovers - will not come true in this life, climbs onto the roof and takes one, too big step forward.

First published in 1974 by Dr.

Hook & the Medicine Show, it was not until 1979 that Marianne Faithfull gave the song its definitive, poignant interpretation.

The title that completes the triptych of abandonment is called "Days of Pearly Spencer" (later releases prefixed the title with "The"), dated 1967 and written and sung by David McWilliams.

To this day, the song has a firm place in the oldie format radios of the republic, almost everyone will have heard it, but only a few would think they could say: Who is Pearly Spencer?

And who is David McWilliams?