30 Day Song Challenge Day 4: Sad Songs Say So Much

Day 4: A Song That Makes You Sad

After lamenting yesterday that I had too many sad songs in my music library you'd think today's prompt would be easy for me, but actually it's probably even harder. See, it's actually really rare for a song to bring down my mood. A really well done sad song tends to have either a tragic soulfulness (think anything Solomon Burke has ever done) or a raw, visceral power (see: Rites of Spring) and I tend to get caught up in its purity of declaration; lost in the poetry of the lyrics. I love being moved by music and when an artist or group makes me feel something through song I can't help but fall in love with the beauty of their expression. In these cases I feel inspiration more than anything else.

When my mood is down to begin with I'll even use sad songs to bring me up as hearing someone else deal with pain brings a sense of comforting camaraderie. Perhaps this really is the reason it's so hard for me to find music that makes me sad - I use so often use my favorite sad songs therapeutically. Sometimes, in the throws of anxiety and heartache, the only proper medication is pouring two fingers of whiskey while Morrissey pleads for something he wants.



Only one song has ever made me cry, Autopilot Off's "Friday Mourning", and that had more to do with circumstance than the actual song. It popped up randomly on WinAmp a couple of hours after I'd learned my grandmother died and I insta-bawled, but the song had never affected me that way before and hasn't affected me that way since. It was just sort of a coincidental trigger - I never strongly associated the song with the event. For a while The Good Life's "Album of the Year" brought me down because it pretty accurately reflected a situation I had going on, but that kind of pain always fades and the song lost its effectiveness over time.

As a sucker for love songs I suppose the song that really affects me, the one that brings me down despite its delicate, graceful instrumentations and simple, evocative lyrics, is Iron and Wine's "Naked as We Came".

It's an incredibly pretty song that's wonderful to listen to, but whose ultimate message is that even the most perfect love will end in death. No matter how storybook the life the last chapter is already written. This is a hard truth to bear since it is so immutable. Songs about pain and loss are easier to take because along with all the sorrow there's always hope that something better will come along after. That your life will move on once the hurt heals. In this song there is no pain to get over, nothing to move past; only the fact that once you move past it, once that pain ends, another end awaits you. The best times are at the beginning, waking up next to the person you love, and nothing ever disrupts this except for the one thing that's completely unavoidable.

The album that holds this song, Our Endless Numbered Days is incredibly hard for me to listen to for this precise reason as this theme carries through. The record isn't one of sadness, however, but more of, "Eat, drink and be merry, for tomorrow we die." It's about living fully because our time is limited. I don't usually shy away from these themes, but this isn't quite Emerson cavalierly writing,

“Just to fill the hour – that is happiness. Fill my hour, ye gods, so that I shall not say whilst I have done this ‘behold an hour of my life is gone,’ but rather ‘I have lived one hour.’”

There's a resignedness within Days that seems so poignant, so melancholy that I cannot get past it.

Here's to hoping for a cheerier topic tomorrow. After writing this it might be time for some whiskey and Morrissey.