Would-be-goods - Casanova '92
Leonard Cohen - Love Calls You By Your Name
Peter Murphy - Subway
Magnetic Fields - Blue You
Sam Phillips - Entertainmen
Coldplay - Trouble
Travis - Writing to Reach You
Elvis Costello - I Want You
The The - August and September
David Johansen - Alabama Song
Laurie Anderson - Broken
Nick Cave - We Came Along This Road
Einsturzende Neubauten - Beauty
Tori Amos - After All
The Big Boys - Sound on Sound
Badly Drawn Boy - Once Around the Block
Bjork - Heirloom

The cd has a loosely defined story arc to it. Girl meets boy, falls in love. Boy is a philandering Casanova, breaks her heart. She warns him that he's going to fall in love too some day, which he does in the second song (with someone else), and it's not really pretty. The relationship is troubled from the start, but the woman draws him in. There's various songs about sadness and an inability to reach each other. Finally, they break up and she gets together with someone else. The guy is horribly jealous (I Want You, darling, but not with that clown) and despairing:

Suddenly last summer
I started going out of my head
In a tiny hotel room
Lying naked on a bed
I knew what you were doing, and I knew what you'd done
Your life with me was ending, your new life had begun
But I was cursing your name, and I was cursing that room
And I was praying for the strength to stop loving you

and they get back together for a little while, knowing the whole time that it's not good. Taking up drinking, things just get worse and worse. By the point wheree "Broken" comes along, there's no fixing it, ever. There's lots of love, but there's no fixing these two people. It just can't be done. They're finished.

I don't know what I was hoping for
I hit the road at a run
I was your lover
I was your man
There never was no other
I was your friend
Till we came along this road

Alone, the man wanders the city, despondant, until he sees the moon, and he has one of those moments where he reflects on what happens, feeling totally alone and yet, kinda okay with it, filled with sadness and he knows that he can't figure out what beauty and love even mean.

Still filled with despair, but growing numb to it all, he says:

I've borrowed your time and I'm sorry I called
But the thought just occurred that we're nobody's children at all, after all

He decides that love is a complete waste, it's just passing time and there's no point to it, and he spends a long time feeling this way, but then something changes, he comes to a resolve or he meets someone new, and he thinks that maybe he can make that first step again to start over. And that's the end. Not necessarily a resolve, but a hopeful end. Heirloom is not really part of the story, but it echoes the hopefulness of Once Around the Block.

As an aside, the sequence of Nick Cave to Neubauten to Tori Amos to the Big Boys to Badly Drawn Boy is my favorite sequence of songs I've put on a mix ever. It's fucking fantastic.