Karl had an array of black audiocassettes in his VW bug, a self-sequenced assemblage of upbeat melancholia that first introduced me to the miserablism of Morrissey, but it didn’t take until I was house sitting in grad school and popped my friend’s copy of The Queen Is Dead (1986) into the tape deck and became properly acquainted with the Smiths (and, tangentially, Alain Delon and Hubert Selby, Jr.).
The entire album is a masterpiece, but “There Is a Light That Never Goes Out” could be played on repeat for the rest of my life, and there would be no complaints.