The Random Weekend gods have served up a meaty selection on this particular Saturday. ‘Last Night I Dreamt That Somebody Loved Me’ is a fine song in its own right but also has a host of interesting associations to explore.

For example, it was the final single from the band’s final album, inviting interpretations that the heartbreak it explores is The Smiths’ own demise. Is the dream of love the doomed partnership between Morrissey and Johnny Marr? Probably not, but it makes for fun listening.

Both Morrissey and Marr count this as their favorite Smiths track (or at least they each did so on at least one occasion). David Bowie has made the same claim, and that’s high praise from a man who forged a legendary career out of the same sort of emotional theatricality. Even Outkast’s Andre 3000 once said that this is one song he wishes he himself had written.

And what are we to make of the song’s extended intro, during which hesitant, mournful piano chords are backed by what sounds like a restless crowd? The song proper erupts from this cacophony in what I read as a representation of the singer emerging from the titular dream.

But my strongest association with this song will always belong to Nick Hornby’s High Fidelity, which remains my favorite novel. In one of the most-quoted passages, Hornby lists today’s SOTD among a handful of other favorites about heartbreak and wonders what effect all of this misery has on impressionable minds:

Some of my favourite songs: ‘Only Love Can Break Your Heart’ by Neil Young; ‘Last Night I Dreamt That Somebody Loved Me’ by the Smiths; ‘Call Me’ by Aretha Fanklin; ‘I Don’t Want to Talk About It’ by anybody.

And then there’s ‘Love Hurts’ and ‘When Love Breaks Down’ and ‘How Can You Mend a Broken Heart’ and ‘The Speed Of The Sound Of Loneliness’ and ‘She’s Gone’ and ‘I Just Don’t Know What To Do With Myself’ and … some of these songs I have listened to around once a week, on average (three hundred times in the first month, every now and again thereafter), since I was sixteen or nineteen or twenty-one.

How can that not leave you bruised somewhere? How can that not turn you into the sort of person liable to break into little bits when your first love goes all wrong? What came first, the music or the misery? Did I listen to music because I was miserable? Or was I miserable because I listened to music? Do all those records turn you into a melancholy person?

People worry about kids playing with guns, and teenagers watching violent videos; we are scared that some sort of culture of violence will take them over. Nobody worries about kids listening to thousands – literally thousands – of songs about broken hearts and rejection and pain and misery and loss.