Sad Songs

Overview: :(

When The Beatles invented pop music in 1960, the only songs that the population at large wanted to hear were ones of a happy nature, like "A Hard Day's Night", "I Wanna Hold Your Hand", and "Shoobadoobawawawa (I'm So Happy)", the last of which may or may not be a song at all but, face it, it sounds like it's a Beatles song, which proves my point.



Above: :D

Sad Songs were invented in 1969 by the innovative British songwriter/folksinger/sad person Nick Drake.


Above: Nick Drake looking (not pictured at right) at something probably pretty sad. Possibly a dying puppy or a park bench that reminds him of where he used to sit on cool Autumn evenings with his lost love, as the orange leaves softly fell about them like faeries, dancing in a dream.

Oddly, several years earlier, in 1965, Beatle Paul McCartney wrote what would later go on to be a sad song. Called "Yesterday", the song was initially met with confusion and a complete lack of interest as the genre to which it belonged had yet to be invented.

So unready was the world for sad songs that, sadly, the genre's inventor, the aforementioned Drake, died just a few years after establishing the genre; young, alone, and virtually unheard of.

It would be another 25 years before Drake and his innovative approach to music achieved any level of acclaim or popularity. In that time, many artists attempted to pay homage to Drake -notably acts like U2, The Cowboy Junkies, and The Smiths- by writing their own sad songs, often by "sneaking" them on to popular albums or by releasing albums that almost nobody actually bought. Today, an overwhelming majority of bands (the good ones) include at least one sad song on every album!

Before we move on, it is important to clarify an often confusing distinction, and that is the one between sad songs and songs about sad things.

Sad songs cover topics ranging from heartbreak, heartache, and doomed relationships that seemed really great at first but actually turned out to be, yeah, pretty doomed.



Above: The author listens to sad song #34578AE6.892 - "I Know", by Fiona Apple. Note the look of quiet, meditative despair, the fact that the author is not looking at the camera, and that the picture is in black and white; all signs an individual is listening to a sad song.


Songs about sad things range in topics from sad things and sad events that have happened to sad people.

For instance, the rock band R.E.M. wrote one of the most popular sad songs ever, called "Everybody Hurts" . Note the very sad title of this song, as it helps to clarify this distinction. Conversely, R.E.M also wrote several songs about sad things, such as "Let Me In" . Note the ambiguous, maybe-sad title here. Is it about someone who has emotionally shut himself off from the world, or is it about a guy who lost his keys? One would not know from the title alone. It's actually about Kurt Cobain (which is pretty sad). But you will note that "Kurt Cobain" is not the same thing as "the heartbreak one feels after a really bad breakup", and therein lies the difference. Other songs about sad things include The Foo Fighters' "My Hero", which is about Kurt Cobain, Natalie Merchant's "River", which is about River Phoenix, and Sarah McLachlan's "Angel", which is about Kurt Cobain.

However, it is easily possible to cite three examples of sad songs by these artists, such as The Foo Fighters' "Walking After You", which is about heartache, Natalie Merchant's "The Letter", which is about heartache/doomed relationships that seemed really great at first but actually turned out to be, yeah, pretty doomed, and Sarah McLachlan's every single song except for "Angel", which is about heartbreak, heartache, and doomed relationships that seemed really great at first but actually turned out to be, yeah, pretty doomed.

It is also helpful to know that sad songs often reference such locales as the sea, the stars, "a faraway place" (possibly Ireland), a bar, a bedroom, or right here where I stand.





















Above: At left, the possible subject of a sad song. At right, the possible subject of a song about sad things, possibly shown writing a sad song.


When actively seeking out sad songs, it is often difficult to know just which albums contain one or more of such songs. Luckily, there are visual clues one can use as hints to figure out how just how sad an album will turn out to be. The three things to look out on album covers are any instances and/or combinations of a) black and white photography b) the artist/artists not looking at the camera and apparently staring at nothing (because of the pain) c) drawn or otherwise abstracted images that stand in for photographs because the artist doesn't want to be photographed right now (because of the pain). Below are some examples. As a reference, I've included the cover to an album that likely does not contain sad songs so that the difference becomes even more apparent.



Today, one of the most popular forms of sad songs is called "Jeff Buckley". In his short life, Buckley focused his talent on crafting the saddest possible songs ever and training his voice to sound like the very embodiment of futile longing and desire itself. Following the sad path of sad song-inventor Nick Drake, Buckley sadly died after releasing one critically acclaimed, wretchedly heartbreaking album that tears at your emotional core like a rabid wolf in winter, forcing you to confront your own dormant emotional undercurrents like a torture-hungry inquisitor for the soul. Probably because he was really attractive in that shy kind of way, wrote and performed songs that exposed his sensitivity and romantic idealism, and died, making him tantalizingly unattainable but theoretically eternally "available", Jeff Buckley is especially popular among Women.

In the last year, sad songs reached such a fever pitch of popularity that a major motion picture about sad songs was released!


Above: A scene from the sad songs movie. NOTE: This is not an album cover. In the actual movie, the actual characters actually enact the sad song album cover tradition of not looking at the camera and apparently staring at nothing (because of the pain).

The sad songs movie had it all! It starred Glen Hansard, a notable sad song writer who once wrote a song called "Sad Songs"; it featured two characters who were both in the midst of suffering heartbreak and heartache, and who, together, embarked on a doomed relationship that seemed really great at first but actually turned out to be, yeah, pretty doomed; and, best of all, they spent most of the movie performing actual sad songs, with classic sad song names like "Falling Slowly", "If You Want Me", "Lies", "When Your Mind's Made Up", "All The Way Down", and "Leave".

All 400+ people who saw the sad songs movie described it as "heartbreaking".

At the advice of several experts on the subject, before immersing myself in sad songs, I first decided to go through a horrific, soul-shattering, heart-crushing break-up. It is taken for granted among sad song experts that this is the only way to truly appreciate and understand sad songs...because it's more like they understand you.

So perhaps now is the time to bring up a significant disadvantage with sad songs, because if my experience is in any indication, it takes a quarter century just to have this experience. Further, I'm not sure it was worth going through just for the sake of experiencing sad songs the way they were meant to be experienced.

Regardless, the sad songs I selected for my own investigation are of a type known as "Damien Rice". (Disclaimer: I could not use the "Jeff Buckley" type for this investigation mainly because the source of the heartbreak totally loved Jeff Buckley and that would have been just way too much.) The following passages were taken from my daily notes as I simultaneously suffered agonizing, barely-worth-living-through emotional torment and listened to Damien Rice.

• January 18, 2006: "God..."



• January 21, 2006: "It's like...every time I listen to 'The Blower's Daughter' my eyes well up and I can't even look at my computer screen at work, y'know? It, like...burns. So I just have to walk outside and take a walk around the block, but, like, what good does that do? Seriously, what's the point of any of this? And should I just maybe stop listening to this song? I guess I could, but why hide from how I feel? And this, this right here is how I feel. "I can't take my mind off of you...I can't take my mind off of you...". That's goddamn right...



• January 24, 2006: "Christ, is this a true story? Damien...man...what did this girl DO to you? I just wish I could find out if you're feeling any better about it now, y'know? You're probably not, though. Probably not. I know I never will stop feeling as wretched and empty as I do now. You probably won't, either..."



• January 25, 2006: "What is it about heartbreak that makes you want to end everything you write with ellipses?...Maybe I should just stop writing for a while..."



• February 8, 2006: "Got drunk the other night...thought of you...listened to 'Cheers, Darlin''. You know what that song's about? Do you? It's about Damien going to the wedding of, like, the only girl he ever loved! Going to her wedding! Jesus, I hope that doesn't happen to me. Man...Damien...man...



• March 5, 2006: "Still can't listen to 'The Blower's Daughter' anymore. Listening to 'Amie' a lot more. "I'm not a miracle/ And you're not a saint". "Tell it like you still believe/ That the end of a century/ Brings a change for you and me". You said it, Damien. You said it. If only you would listen. GOD...why won't you listen??? The weather is getting warmer, but I remain cold. Cold.



• April 7, 2006: "I basically stopped writing. I don't care anymore. All I do is listen to "I Remember". God, that song cuts through my chest cavity and squeezes my heart so that all the sunlight that once shone through it when you smiled at me drains out and pours like a raging waterfall into an endless black abyss of nothingness. It is so, so good. Because, you know what? I remember it well. The first time I saw your head 'round the door, as mine stopped working! TOTALLY! That's, like, exactly what happened with us...when I first saw you...Man, this is just so beautiful...



• April 23, 2006: "Jesus..."

There's more, obviously (this goes on like this for a year or so), but you get the idea. The fact is, sad songs are great when you're heartbroken, but maybe in that same way that deep fried food is great when you're totally wasted; which is to say, it feels good, but may make you worse off in the long run, and maybe just not getting wasted in the first place is the way to go.

But in our age of little to no individual responsibility and unimaginable technological convenience, the massive swell in popularity of the sad song makes a lot of sense. After all, what else do we really have to deal with aside from our own disappointment in the face of failed attempts at realizing unrealistic conceptions of romantic love? In Nick Drake's time, for instance, people had to deal with things like Vietnam, government corruption, social upheaval, and not having cell phones/internet. It's not a surprise that his meditative, self-conscious pondering of matters of the heart didn't "take" back then!

Today, the sad song can really have it's time in the dark!

And, the real plus side to sad songs is that, even if you manage to move past the point where every second of every day you are reminded of the loss of the one thing you ever really and truly loved and that ever made your heart feel safe, your self feel worthwhile, and your future seem bright, you can just throw on "Fix You", and all of that disappointment, grief, and vulnerability will come rushing back like a tidal wave!

Above: Lights will guide you home...
(But you will never come home...to me...) :(


Rating: ***** (out of 4...but, like, only when you're in the mood, y'know?)

Bottom Line: I just don't want to talk about it right now. I know you think you understand, but you don't. Trust me, okay?

You don't.