SOMETIMES when I hear music on the radio, I think of the fact that other people are also listening. People possibly not as perfect as me. With pasts and regrets different from my own.

Post-love songs of the bitter, you-wronged-me variety make me wonder how many of my fellow radio listeners are arriving fresh from the other end of a romantic transaction. The bad end, you know. But does it matter? Such is the gift of music that even the dumpers and the abandoners get to imagine themselves as the victimized and the innocent when they sing along to classics like Gloria Gaynor’s “I Will Survive.”