#like ik lots of jo fans are younger than me and there's no shame at all in bringing your parents i just feel so embarrassed?? to???

[vse-kar-vem]

together in every universe. or something

#bojan cvjetićanin #kris guštin #joker out #im neglecting schoolwork to draw this but that seems like the norm at this point #hoping if i get it all out of my system now i'll be normal during exam szn (in like. a week 😨) #<<sorry if i keep talking about school btw (semi age reveal ahead) gcses are fucking killing me uuaghhgshhahhhaj #i actually quite like this since i started drawing on a whim this afternoon and its only ten now #i dont even mind the lineart (DONT LOOK AT BOJANS HAND OR ILL JUMP OUT A WINDOW) #only a one storey one tho 💗💗💗 can't die without seeing bokris irl <<pipe dream as im too embarrassed to go to a concert #NO because bumping into jo in london would be my worst fucking nightmare 😭😭😭 #what do i even fucking say 'hey are you jan from jo--' NO id combust on the spot #and what if im bothering them uknow 😭😭 idk but i used to live in an asian city where none of my idols from the west would ever visit #(except safiya love you safiya) so keeping the real life person and fictiinalized versions apart in my brain and/or at arms length was easy #but now that i live in the uk and the chances of seeing them irl are non-zero? and presented with the chance to #actively seek them out and you know go to a concert #im just too scared and awkward to do it #maybe i'll bully my friend into going with me #i feel safer revealing age more in the fucking depths of these tags but another thing that makes me feel awkward about going is age #like ik lots of jo fans are younger than me and there's no shame at all in bringing your parents i just feel so embarrassed?? to??? #like i'd rather go with my friends #but that would require at least us riding the train alone and i am a small east asian girl who never looks up from the floor ever #sooooo #not happening any time soon #maybe next yr?? but probably not #unless i suddenly get a lot more independant and cool #i doubt anyone's read this much of my tags but if you have 😭😭 hope you like the art i guess #at the time of me writing i want to draw more but i'll see #(you will know since it will have been posted) #a tag previously used to say 'queueing to post at school' this is false as i am now in fact nauseous at home #my art

[getyourgossip0-blog]

Crazy in love: can marriages between rock superstars ever really work?

New Post has been published on http://getyourgossip.xyz/crazy-in-love-can-marriages-between-rock-superstars-ever-really-work/

Crazy in love: can marriages between rock superstars ever really work?

When Beyoncé and Jay-Z flew into Salford this week, ahead of their On the Run II show in Manchester, the gossip columns noted several details: that Beyoncé wore a black hooded jacket, their children were not with them and, most provocatively, that the pair landed in separate helicopters.

The insinuation was clear: all might not be rosy. For while both musicians have enjoyed stunningly successful solo careers, it is their 15-year union that has long captured the public’s imagination: a relationship that began with a duet – 2003’s Bonnie and Clyde – and has continued through courtship, marriage, children, infidelity, two painfully confessional albums about marital difficulty and a second instalment of a joint world tour. The success of their relationship, despite the pressures and media attention, is quite remarkable.

In their shows this week, the pair have willingly referenced their relationship – videos screened home movies and apparent images of their children alongside the message “Love never changes”, but there was also footage of houses burning down and vows being renewed. And while the pair held hands and Beyoncé announced: “It makes me so happy to be on stage with the man I love”, both played songs from Lemonade and 4:44, their respective portraits of a marriage in turmoil.

Any marriage is a delicate creation, but from Ike and Tina Turner to Sonny and Cher, Notorious BIG and Faith Evans to Gwen Stefani and Gavin Rossdale, the union between two musicians has long seemed more vulnerable than most.

For some, this has fuelled their work – Fleetwood Mac’s 1977 album Rumours documents the marriage breakdown of John and Christine McVie as well as the collapse of the on/off relationship between their bandmates Stevie Nicks and Lindsey Buckingham. Abba began as two couples – Agnetha Fältskog and Björn Ulvaeus, and Anni-Frid Lyngstad and Benny Andersson, but as their relationships faltered their music grew in introspection and maturity. By the time of their 1981 masterpiece The Visitors, both had separated. Michelle and John Phillips’ marriage lasted only as long as the Mamas and the Papas. Jack and Meg White of the White Stripes managed to navigate the musical fame that arrived after their divorce. What makes a superstar marriage falter, what helps it endure, and why are they so complicated?

Musicians are prey to the same pressures as other famous or successful couples – demanding jobs, long stretches apart, a want of privacy. And music itself can play a role in the marriage. In 2016, after Jay-Z was accused of infidelity, Beyoncé’s riposte came in the form of Lemonade and, most particularly, the track Sorry, a sublime hurl of rage, accusation and defiance. “Today I regret the night I put that ring on,” she sneered. “He always got them fucking excuses.” Although it was the line: “He better call Becky with the good hair” – apparently in reference to her husband’s mistress – that proved most potent: for weeks, speculation abounded about Becky’s true identity.

“I think the thing about musicians is that when they’re writing songs about the relationship, they’re private thoughts but they’re singing them publicly,” says behavioural psychologist Jo Hemmings. “You’re singing to your partner via music – so music becomes almost a third party. That’s a good thing if you can mediate through it, if you find it easier than talking about problems. It’s probably quite restorative and recuperative in a way – it’s part of the therapeutic process.”

But at times, she suggests, it can prove an unsettling and indirect way of communicating. “It raises questions,” she says. “Was that song about me? Was it real, or just your imagination? And if so, why were you thinking that way? So you have got to be able to back it up and be accountable. Otherwise, you could leave the other party at a loss, or perhaps even writing a song in response and hanging out your dirty washing in public.”

Abba started out as two couples, but its music grew as their relationships faltered. Photograph: Alamy

Being part of a successful musical couple does, of course, bring specific difficulties. When Cherilyn “Cher” Sarkisian met Sonny Bono at a cafe in Los Angeles in 1962, she was 16 and he was 27. They were married for six years before splitting in 1974 – Sonny citing “irreconcilable differences”, Cher countering with charges of “involuntary servitude” and the accusation that he withheld earnings from her. Twelve years after Bono’s death, Cher told Vanity Fair that he had treated her “more like a golden goose than like his wife”. Although time, perhaps, and his passing had mellowed her feelings. “I forgive him, I think,” she added. “He hurt me in so many ways, but there was something. He was so much more than a husband — a terrible husband, but a great mentor, a great teacher.”

Often what breaks apart a musical marriage are the obvious things – perhaps no different from those in any other marital breakdown, but amplified by the gleam of showbusiness – infidelity, boredom, distance, the slow sad inevitability of two lives drifting apart.

The difference is that in the eyes of the public they have come to represent something more than just two people in a marriage. When Kim Gordon wrote in her autobiography, Girl in a Band, of the end of her 27-year marriage to her fellow Sonic Youth member Thurston Moore, its details were strikingly ordinary, but carried the extra weight, shame and sadness of the publicness of their split: “The couple everyone believed was golden and normal and eternally intact, who gave younger musicians hope they could outlast a crazy rock’n’roll world, was now just another cliche of relationship failure,” she wrote. “A male midlife crisis, another woman, a double life.”

Kim Gordon and Thurston Moore of Sonic Youth split after 27 years. Photograph: John Zich/The Life Images Collection/Getty Images

Infidelity is common in any walk of life, but in a musical marriage, temptation is arguably greater. Partners are often apart on tour, having quite different unshared experiences and, in such circumstances, a sense of closeness can be hard to maintain. More problematic can be the gulf between the stage and domesticity – thousands of fans screaming their name, the surge of adoration, the assistants on call, the manager to shield them, the hours of interviews spent talking only about themselves, and then back home to something more prosaic: a partner whose love is less fawning, who sees them as a flawed human being.

But sometimes, magically, it can work. Tom Waits and Kathleen Brennan have been together since 1980, and while Waits is the frontman in their pairing, they have a strong songwriting partnership and he frequently speaks of her talents. Brennan, Waits once said, is “a remarkable collaborator, and she’s a shiksa goddess and a trapeze artist, all of that. She can fix the truck. Expert on the African violet and all that. She’s outta this world. I don’t know what to say. I’m a lucky man. She has a remarkable imagination. And that’s the nation where I live. She’s bold, inventive and fearless. That’s who you wanna go in the woods with, right? Somebody who finishes your sentences for you.”

Johnny Cash’s first marriage to Vivian Liberto was in many ways a portrait of how the celebrity marriage can go awry — a young, hurried union when they barely knew one another, and both struggled with their new way of life when Cash found fame. Liberto filed for divorce, weary of her husband’s constant touring, his problems with drugs and alcohol and womanising.

When he married June Carter it was quite a different relationship. The pair had known each other for many years before becoming a couple, and Carter was already part of a well-known musical family with an understanding of the industry. They married in 1968 and died within four months of one another in 2003. Key to their marriage was their understanding of intimacy in the midst of a public relationship –although Cash’s proposal was rather ostentatious: “He asked me to marry him in front of 7,000 people,” she once recalled, “but I would’ve liked it if he had gotten down on his knees and proposed to me, you know. But that was the way it was. It was a great big production …”

Johnny Cash and June Carter Cash had an enduring relationship. Photograph: Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images

Still, Cash would speak often and pleasingly of the simplicity of their bond. Once, asked for a definition of paradise, he replied: “This morning, with her, having coffee.”

What kept them together was the acknowledgement that what truly mattered was far away from the swagger of the stage. “There’s unconditional love there,” he once said. “You hear that phrase a lot, but it’s real with me and her. She loves me in spite of everything, in spite of myself. She has saved my life more than once. She’s always been there with her love, and it has certainly made me forget the pain for a long time, many times. When it gets dark and everybody’s gone home and the lights are turned off, it’s just me and her.”

When Lou Reed died in 2013 his wife Laurie Anderson paid tribute to their long relationship in an essay for Rolling Stone, citing their shared understanding of peculiar careers as part of what held them together. Reed had asked her out after they first met taking part at a concert in Munich and her response, tempered by her commitment to her own work, apparently delighted him: “I think he liked it when I said Yes! Absolutely! I’m on tour – but when I get back, let’s see, about four months from now, let’s definitely get together.” She added: “Musicians being married is sort of like lawyers being married. When you say: ‘Gee, I have to work in the studio til three tonight’ – or cancel all your plans to finish the case – you pretty much know what that means and you don’t necessarily hit the ceiling.”

To read Anderson’s essay is to be reminded of all the normal, complex, beautiful things that make up a relationship – how they loved butterfly-hunting, kayaking, their dog, how sometimes they felt angry or abandoned, and how together they “constructed ways to be”. And how, throughout their 21 years together as partners and professional musicians, they were bound by this remarkable combination of the humdrum and the spectacular, the silence and the song. “How strange and exciting and miraculous,” she wrote, “that we can change each other so much through our words and music and our real lives.”

[getyourgossip0-blog]

Crazy in love: can marriages between rock superstars ever really work?

New Post has been published on http://getyourgossip.xyz/crazy-in-love-can-marriages-between-rock-superstars-ever-really-work/

Crazy in love: can marriages between rock superstars ever really work?

When Beyoncé and Jay-Z flew into Salford this week, ahead of their On the Run II show in Manchester, the gossip columns noted several details: that Beyoncé wore a black hooded jacket, their children were not with them and, most provocatively, that the pair landed in separate helicopters.

The insinuation was clear: all might not be rosy. For while both musicians have enjoyed stunningly successful solo careers, it is their 15-year union that has long captured the public’s imagination: a relationship that began with a duet – 2003’s Bonnie and Clyde – and has continued through courtship, marriage, children, infidelity, two painfully confessional albums about marital difficulty and a second instalment of a joint world tour. The success of their relationship, despite the pressures and media attention, is quite remarkable.

In their shows this week, the pair have willingly referenced their relationship – videos screened home movies and apparent images of their children alongside the message “Love never changes”, but there was also footage of houses burning down and vows being renewed. And while the pair held hands and Beyoncé announced: “It makes me so happy to be on stage with the man I love”, both played songs from Lemonade and 4:44, their respective portraits of a marriage in turmoil.

Any marriage is a delicate creation, but from Ike and Tina Turner to Sonny and Cher, Notorious BIG and Faith Evans to Gwen Stefani and Gavin Rossdale, the union between two musicians has long seemed more vulnerable than most.

For some, this has fuelled their work – Fleetwood Mac’s 1977 album Rumours documents the marriage breakdown of John and Christine McVie as well as the collapse of the on/off relationship between their bandmates Stevie Nicks and Lindsey Buckingham. Abba began as two couples – Agnetha Fältskog and Björn Ulvaeus, and Anni-Frid Lyngstad and Benny Andersson, but as their relationships faltered their music grew in introspection and maturity. By the time of their 1981 masterpiece The Visitors, both had separated. Michelle and John Phillips’ marriage lasted only as long as the Mamas and the Papas. Jack and Meg White of the White Stripes managed to navigate the musical fame that arrived after their divorce. What makes a superstar marriage falter, what helps it endure, and why are they so complicated?

Musicians are prey to the same pressures as other famous or successful couples – demanding jobs, long stretches apart, a want of privacy. And music itself can play a role in the marriage. In 2016, after Jay-Z was accused of infidelity, Beyoncé’s riposte came in the form of Lemonade and, most particularly, the track Sorry, a sublime hurl of rage, accusation and defiance. “Today I regret the night I put that ring on,” she sneered. “He always got them fucking excuses.” Although it was the line: “He better call Becky with the good hair” – apparently in reference to her husband’s mistress – that proved most potent: for weeks, speculation abounded about Becky’s true identity.

“I think the thing about musicians is that when they’re writing songs about the relationship, they’re private thoughts but they’re singing them publicly,” says behavioural psychologist Jo Hemmings. “You’re singing to your partner via music – so music becomes almost a third party. That’s a good thing if you can mediate through it, if you find it easier than talking about problems. It’s probably quite restorative and recuperative in a way – it’s part of the therapeutic process.”

But at times, she suggests, it can prove an unsettling and indirect way of communicating. “It raises questions,” she says. “Was that song about me? Was it real, or just your imagination? And if so, why were you thinking that way? So you have got to be able to back it up and be accountable. Otherwise, you could leave the other party at a loss, or perhaps even writing a song in response and hanging out your dirty washing in public.”

Abba started out as two couples, but its music grew as their relationships faltered. Photograph: Alamy

Being part of a successful musical couple does, of course, bring specific difficulties. When Cherilyn “Cher” Sarkisian met Sonny Bono at a cafe in Los Angeles in 1962, she was 16 and he was 27. They were married for six years before splitting in 1974 – Sonny citing “irreconcilable differences”, Cher countering with charges of “involuntary servitude” and the accusation that he withheld earnings from her. Twelve years after Bono’s death, Cher told Vanity Fair that he had treated her “more like a golden goose than like his wife”. Although time, perhaps, and his passing had mellowed her feelings. “I forgive him, I think,” she added. “He hurt me in so many ways, but there was something. He was so much more than a husband — a terrible husband, but a great mentor, a great teacher.”

Often what breaks apart a musical marriage are the obvious things – perhaps no different from those in any other marital breakdown, but amplified by the gleam of showbusiness – infidelity, boredom, distance, the slow sad inevitability of two lives drifting apart.

The difference is that in the eyes of the public they have come to represent something more than just two people in a marriage. When Kim Gordon wrote in her autobiography, Girl in a Band, of the end of her 27-year marriage to her fellow Sonic Youth member Thurston Moore, its details were strikingly ordinary, but carried the extra weight, shame and sadness of the publicness of their split: “The couple everyone believed was golden and normal and eternally intact, who gave younger musicians hope they could outlast a crazy rock’n’roll world, was now just another cliche of relationship failure,” she wrote. “A male midlife crisis, another woman, a double life.”

Kim Gordon and Thurston Moore of Sonic Youth split after 27 years. Photograph: John Zich/The Life Images Collection/Getty Images

Infidelity is common in any walk of life, but in a musical marriage, temptation is arguably greater. Partners are often apart on tour, having quite different unshared experiences and, in such circumstances, a sense of closeness can be hard to maintain. More problematic can be the gulf between the stage and domesticity – thousands of fans screaming their name, the surge of adoration, the assistants on call, the manager to shield them, the hours of interviews spent talking only about themselves, and then back home to something more prosaic: a partner whose love is less fawning, who sees them as a flawed human being.

But sometimes, magically, it can work. Tom Waits and Kathleen Brennan have been together since 1980, and while Waits is the frontman in their pairing, they have a strong songwriting partnership and he frequently speaks of her talents. Brennan, Waits once said, is “a remarkable collaborator, and she’s a shiksa goddess and a trapeze artist, all of that. She can fix the truck. Expert on the African violet and all that. She’s outta this world. I don’t know what to say. I’m a lucky man. She has a remarkable imagination. And that’s the nation where I live. She’s bold, inventive and fearless. That’s who you wanna go in the woods with, right? Somebody who finishes your sentences for you.”

Johnny Cash’s first marriage to Vivian Liberto was in many ways a portrait of how the celebrity marriage can go awry — a young, hurried union when they barely knew one another, and both struggled with their new way of life when Cash found fame. Liberto filed for divorce, weary of her husband’s constant touring, his problems with drugs and alcohol and womanising.

When he married June Carter it was quite a different relationship. The pair had known each other for many years before becoming a couple, and Carter was already part of a well-known musical family with an understanding of the industry. They married in 1968 and died within four months of one another in 2003. Key to their marriage was their understanding of intimacy in the midst of a public relationship –although Cash’s proposal was rather ostentatious: “He asked me to marry him in front of 7,000 people,” she once recalled, “but I would’ve liked it if he had gotten down on his knees and proposed to me, you know. But that was the way it was. It was a great big production …”

Johnny Cash and June Carter Cash had an enduring relationship. Photograph: Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images

Still, Cash would speak often and pleasingly of the simplicity of their bond. Once, asked for a definition of paradise, he replied: “This morning, with her, having coffee.”

What kept them together was the acknowledgement that what truly mattered was far away from the swagger of the stage. “There’s unconditional love there,” he once said. “You hear that phrase a lot, but it’s real with me and her. She loves me in spite of everything, in spite of myself. She has saved my life more than once. She’s always been there with her love, and it has certainly made me forget the pain for a long time, many times. When it gets dark and everybody’s gone home and the lights are turned off, it’s just me and her.”

When Lou Reed died in 2013 his wife Laurie Anderson paid tribute to their long relationship in an essay for Rolling Stone, citing their shared understanding of peculiar careers as part of what held them together. Reed had asked her out after they first met taking part at a concert in Munich and her response, tempered by her commitment to her own work, apparently delighted him: “I think he liked it when I said Yes! Absolutely! I’m on tour – but when I get back, let’s see, about four months from now, let’s definitely get together.” She added: “Musicians being married is sort of like lawyers being married. When you say: ‘Gee, I have to work in the studio til three tonight’ – or cancel all your plans to finish the case – you pretty much know what that means and you don’t necessarily hit the ceiling.”

To read Anderson’s essay is to be reminded of all the normal, complex, beautiful things that make up a relationship – how they loved butterfly-hunting, kayaking, their dog, how sometimes they felt angry or abandoned, and how together they “constructed ways to be”. And how, throughout their 21 years together as partners and professional musicians, they were bound by this remarkable combination of the humdrum and the spectacular, the silence and the song. “How strange and exciting and miraculous,” she wrote, “that we can change each other so much through our words and music and our real lives.”

[getyourgossip0-blog]

Crazy in love: can marriages between rock superstars ever really work?

New Post has been published on http://getyourgossip.xyz/crazy-in-love-can-marriages-between-rock-superstars-ever-really-work/

Crazy in love: can marriages between rock superstars ever really work?

When Beyoncé and Jay-Z flew into Salford this week, ahead of their On the Run II show in Manchester, the gossip columns noted several details: that Beyoncé wore a black hooded jacket, their children were not with them and, most provocatively, that the pair landed in separate helicopters.

The insinuation was clear: all might not be rosy. For while both musicians have enjoyed stunningly successful solo careers, it is their 15-year union that has long captured the public’s imagination: a relationship that began with a duet – 2003’s Bonnie and Clyde – and has continued through courtship, marriage, children, infidelity, two painfully confessional albums about marital difficulty and a second instalment of a joint world tour. The success of their relationship, despite the pressures and media attention, is quite remarkable.

In their shows this week, the pair have willingly referenced their relationship – videos screened home movies and apparent images of their children alongside the message “Love never changes”, but there was also footage of houses burning down and vows being renewed. And while the pair held hands and Beyoncé announced: “It makes me so happy to be on stage with the man I love”, both played songs from Lemonade and 4:44, their respective portraits of a marriage in turmoil.

Any marriage is a delicate creation, but from Ike and Tina Turner to Sonny and Cher, Notorious BIG and Faith Evans to Gwen Stefani and Gavin Rossdale, the union between two musicians has long seemed more vulnerable than most.

For some, this has fuelled their work – Fleetwood Mac’s 1977 album Rumours documents the marriage breakdown of John and Christine McVie as well as the collapse of the on/off relationship between their bandmates Stevie Nicks and Lindsey Buckingham. Abba began as two couples – Agnetha Fältskog and Björn Ulvaeus, and Anni-Frid Lyngstad and Benny Andersson, but as their relationships faltered their music grew in introspection and maturity. By the time of their 1981 masterpiece The Visitors, both had separated. Michelle and John Phillips’ marriage lasted only as long as the Mamas and the Papas. Jack and Meg White of the White Stripes managed to navigate the musical fame that arrived after their divorce. What makes a superstar marriage falter, what helps it endure, and why are they so complicated?

Musicians are prey to the same pressures as other famous or successful couples – demanding jobs, long stretches apart, a want of privacy. And music itself can play a role in the marriage. In 2016, after Jay-Z was accused of infidelity, Beyoncé’s riposte came in the form of Lemonade and, most particularly, the track Sorry, a sublime hurl of rage, accusation and defiance. “Today I regret the night I put that ring on,” she sneered. “He always got them fucking excuses.” Although it was the line: “He better call Becky with the good hair” – apparently in reference to her husband’s mistress – that proved most potent: for weeks, speculation abounded about Becky’s true identity.

“I think the thing about musicians is that when they’re writing songs about the relationship, they’re private thoughts but they’re singing them publicly,” says behavioural psychologist Jo Hemmings. “You’re singing to your partner via music – so music becomes almost a third party. That’s a good thing if you can mediate through it, if you find it easier than talking about problems. It’s probably quite restorative and recuperative in a way – it’s part of the therapeutic process.”

But at times, she suggests, it can prove an unsettling and indirect way of communicating. “It raises questions,” she says. “Was that song about me? Was it real, or just your imagination? And if so, why were you thinking that way? So you have got to be able to back it up and be accountable. Otherwise, you could leave the other party at a loss, or perhaps even writing a song in response and hanging out your dirty washing in public.”

Abba started out as two couples, but its music grew as their relationships faltered. Photograph: Alamy

Being part of a successful musical couple does, of course, bring specific difficulties. When Cherilyn “Cher” Sarkisian met Sonny Bono at a cafe in Los Angeles in 1962, she was 16 and he was 27. They were married for six years before splitting in 1974 – Sonny citing “irreconcilable differences”, Cher countering with charges of “involuntary servitude” and the accusation that he withheld earnings from her. Twelve years after Bono’s death, Cher told Vanity Fair that he had treated her “more like a golden goose than like his wife”. Although time, perhaps, and his passing had mellowed her feelings. “I forgive him, I think,” she added. “He hurt me in so many ways, but there was something. He was so much more than a husband — a terrible husband, but a great mentor, a great teacher.”

Often what breaks apart a musical marriage are the obvious things – perhaps no different from those in any other marital breakdown, but amplified by the gleam of showbusiness – infidelity, boredom, distance, the slow sad inevitability of two lives drifting apart.

The difference is that in the eyes of the public they have come to represent something more than just two people in a marriage. When Kim Gordon wrote in her autobiography, Girl in a Band, of the end of her 27-year marriage to her fellow Sonic Youth member Thurston Moore, its details were strikingly ordinary, but carried the extra weight, shame and sadness of the publicness of their split: “The couple everyone believed was golden and normal and eternally intact, who gave younger musicians hope they could outlast a crazy rock’n’roll world, was now just another cliche of relationship failure,” she wrote. “A male midlife crisis, another woman, a double life.”

Kim Gordon and Thurston Moore of Sonic Youth split after 27 years. Photograph: John Zich/The Life Images Collection/Getty Images

Infidelity is common in any walk of life, but in a musical marriage, temptation is arguably greater. Partners are often apart on tour, having quite different unshared experiences and, in such circumstances, a sense of closeness can be hard to maintain. More problematic can be the gulf between the stage and domesticity – thousands of fans screaming their name, the surge of adoration, the assistants on call, the manager to shield them, the hours of interviews spent talking only about themselves, and then back home to something more prosaic: a partner whose love is less fawning, who sees them as a flawed human being.

But sometimes, magically, it can work. Tom Waits and Kathleen Brennan have been together since 1980, and while Waits is the frontman in their pairing, they have a strong songwriting partnership and he frequently speaks of her talents. Brennan, Waits once said, is “a remarkable collaborator, and she’s a shiksa goddess and a trapeze artist, all of that. She can fix the truck. Expert on the African violet and all that. She’s outta this world. I don’t know what to say. I’m a lucky man. She has a remarkable imagination. And that’s the nation where I live. She’s bold, inventive and fearless. That’s who you wanna go in the woods with, right? Somebody who finishes your sentences for you.”

Johnny Cash’s first marriage to Vivian Liberto was in many ways a portrait of how the celebrity marriage can go awry — a young, hurried union when they barely knew one another, and both struggled with their new way of life when Cash found fame. Liberto filed for divorce, weary of her husband’s constant touring, his problems with drugs and alcohol and womanising.

When he married June Carter it was quite a different relationship. The pair had known each other for many years before becoming a couple, and Carter was already part of a well-known musical family with an understanding of the industry. They married in 1968 and died within four months of one another in 2003. Key to their marriage was their understanding of intimacy in the midst of a public relationship –although Cash’s proposal was rather ostentatious: “He asked me to marry him in front of 7,000 people,” she once recalled, “but I would’ve liked it if he had gotten down on his knees and proposed to me, you know. But that was the way it was. It was a great big production …”

Johnny Cash and June Carter Cash had an enduring relationship. Photograph: Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images

Still, Cash would speak often and pleasingly of the simplicity of their bond. Once, asked for a definition of paradise, he replied: “This morning, with her, having coffee.”

What kept them together was the acknowledgement that what truly mattered was far away from the swagger of the stage. “There’s unconditional love there,” he once said. “You hear that phrase a lot, but it’s real with me and her. She loves me in spite of everything, in spite of myself. She has saved my life more than once. She’s always been there with her love, and it has certainly made me forget the pain for a long time, many times. When it gets dark and everybody’s gone home and the lights are turned off, it’s just me and her.”

When Lou Reed died in 2013 his wife Laurie Anderson paid tribute to their long relationship in an essay for Rolling Stone, citing their shared understanding of peculiar careers as part of what held them together. Reed had asked her out after they first met taking part at a concert in Munich and her response, tempered by her commitment to her own work, apparently delighted him: “I think he liked it when I said Yes! Absolutely! I’m on tour – but when I get back, let’s see, about four months from now, let’s definitely get together.” She added: “Musicians being married is sort of like lawyers being married. When you say: ‘Gee, I have to work in the studio til three tonight’ – or cancel all your plans to finish the case – you pretty much know what that means and you don’t necessarily hit the ceiling.”

To read Anderson’s essay is to be reminded of all the normal, complex, beautiful things that make up a relationship – how they loved butterfly-hunting, kayaking, their dog, how sometimes they felt angry or abandoned, and how together they “constructed ways to be”. And how, throughout their 21 years together as partners and professional musicians, they were bound by this remarkable combination of the humdrum and the spectacular, the silence and the song. “How strange and exciting and miraculous,” she wrote, “that we can change each other so much through our words and music and our real lives.”