At this moment, however, the Girl Friend, releasing her wounded lover, made a sudden dash for him, with the plainest intention of blotting him from the earth.

Syd Straw has a big, gutsy, country-tinged voice that sounds just right in songs about wounded but feisty lovers.

Mr. Noll, the McManis Professor of Christian Thought at the evangelical Wheaton College in Illinois, says in a preface to the book that he wrote as "a wounded lover."

He sings as a wounded lover or a wanderer searching for home; now and then, he has moments of whimsy, but they don't last.

'Once I was a wounded lover, Now these fears are fairly over; By receiving what I gave, Thou art lord of what I have.'

As Ms. James promised pure understanding to a wounded lover, she sang with the measured deliberation of someone determined to put aside her own needs or misgivings.

"But I remember Kline saying to him, 'Lee, don't make so much of it,' then he pointed to the tiny drops of paint and said, 'These are our tears and they come together as two wounded lovers."'

Then he wanted to play it over and over again in his mind until his head exploded and his heart resembled a pincushion, like any other wounded lover.

In a mixed review, Rolling Stone editor Jody Rosen wrote that "Clarkson remains a slightly wearying one-note artist--she's a wounded lover, bellowing her pain and scorching the earth.

Both works are the plaints of wounded lovers, but Handel's is fiery and outgoing and Scarlatti's alternates between melancholy and agitation.