If I may ... terrible breakups and lovers' quarrels within bands have inspired some of the greatest music of all time. We're talking about Fleetwood Mac's Rumors. We're gonna mention some 16 Lovers Lane by the Go-Betweens. We're gonna stretch things a great deal and include the Beatles' Let it Be. I had a friend whose band broke up because of a toxic love triangle. I told him he should have stuck it out for one more album. He would've come up with a masterpiece.

In the case of Portland's Thee Headliners, the breakup happened before the music had even started. Holly Morgan and Jeremy Terry went through a breakup and came out on the other side as a musical duo. They credit their collaboration as the thing that saved their friendship from being swallowed up by the relationship's end.

More than 10 years ago, Morgan and Terry split up, but became closer than ever with the formation of Thee Headliners.

"We saved our friendship through music," says Morgan. "I'd never played before I met (Terry). He helped me and really encouraged me to pick up the drums. Then he moved away for five years, went down to Texas, and we did it long-distance. We'd just get together once or twice or three times a year and practice."

In 2005, Terry moved back to Portland and Thee Headliners started building up steam. Remaining a two-piece, Thee Headliners began accruing several albums worth of material and then started recording, often using musician friends to round out the sound on the record.

Their music is a punk-rock-inflected stew of doo-wop, country, AM pop, blues and R&B. They excel on songs like "It Ain't Right," where the classic, strumming structure of Brill Building is paired with a stuttering beat that keeps everything just slightly off-kilter. Terry's crooning baritone comes this close to sounding legit before his lovesick character intones, "Are you shitting me?"

"We definitely bonded over music," says Morgan. "One of the reasons that I totally fell for Jeremy in the first place was the way he played guitar just broke my heart. ... So, we just started playing around with songs that we love."

Starting at first with cover songs, Thee Headliners built up their confidence in a variety of genres, while simultaneously learning how to represent these genres through their own filter. This led to an ease in making classic structures sound unmistakably like Thee Headliners, which allows the band to mix and match styles while sounding intrinsically like themselves.

"You Don't Know" finds Thee Headliners matching a driving melody with a strikingly soulful vocal performance from Morgan. In the middle of all of the garage rock crunch, she comes off as sounding somewhere between Stevie Nicks and Ann Wilson. The combination isn't exactly an intuitive one, but it ends up working to great effect.

It's a funny thing, this whole love ordeal. Funny how its obliteration almost entirely outranks its initiation when it comes to the output of art. Funny that a breakup album can come to define a career that is littered with happier memories and, thus, happier productions. Funny that a breakup can bring two people closer together than they could have been as lovers (if you'll excuse me for using that most odious of words).

Holly Morgan and Jeremy Terry are adults, and so probably don't really think of Thee Headliners in these terms. But it does make me wonder what prosperity there is to be found in the absence of romantic love. That Thee Headliners can find art in such a situation is an encouraging thought to single people, and a sobering thought to those who lack even a co-conspirator, in whatever form that may come.

Thee Headliners

with The Black, Klondike Kate Band
Saturday, March 5, cover TBA,
Bob's Java Jive, 2102 S. Tacoma Way, Tacoma
253.475.9843