Robinson's songs are immediately identifiable by their unusual structure, their unexpected rhythmic emphases, their slowly moving, terraced chords,… and their tortuous, suffocated melancholy. They focus almost obsessively on painful and contradictory feelings, on the discrepancy between dream and reality, between mask and face. Love is a guessing game (Doggone Right). There is a need to turn dream into reality (Dreams, Dreams) or to recognize an illusion for what it is (The Love I Saw in You Was Just a Mirage), to come to terms with the paradox that each hurt makes one's love stronger than before (Ain't That Peculiar). The victim is placed in an intolerable position of dependence (You Neglect Me), while in The Tracks of My Tears and The Tears of a Clown the conflict between keeping face and inner feelings of despair becomes unbearable. (p. 74)

[The Tracks of My Tears is the Miracles] masterpiece. It...