The 20 Saddest Songs
An imperfect and personal selection (as all such lists must be) requested by The Word magazine in November 2007.
(Note: the "clickable" titles will open a new window at the MP3 store, Amazon.co.uk)
What is the saddest song ever written? Some say it's Gloomy Sunday, which first appeared in Hungary in the 1930s and has reportedly been driving listeners to suicide ever since. Billie Holiday made it famous; there are fine versions by Elvis Costello and Sinéad O'Connor as well. It was covered by The Associates, whose singer Billy MacKenzie did indeed kill himself. And the song's composer, one Rezso Seress, saw in the New Year of 1968 by throwing himself out of a window.
What is its power? Perhaps a musicologist and a psychiatrist could compare notes and discover the evil secret. Or perhaps they couldn't. The song that drives one person to despair might leave another quite indifferent. Our emotional response to songs is probably very personal, and should not be over-analysed. Otherwise it's like the frog on the dissecting table - you may or not learn something useful, but the frog certainly dies.
Here are some sad songs, but they are not miserable. They are sweet, sometimes, and rather moving than depressing. They can even be uplifting in the way they affirm the shared experiences and feelings of human life. As a wise person once said: 'Take my word for it, the saddest thing under the sky is a soul incapable of sadness.'
BOULDER TO BIRMINGHAM by Emmylou Harris
I know it's a place name, not a lump of stone, yet 'Boulder' seems precisely right for this masterpiece of love lost; it summons a drear sense of futility and fatigue that your classicists would call 'Sisyphean'. And the verses roll with Biblical resonance: 'I would rock my soul in the bosom of Abraham.' But the line that tops them all? 'The hardest part is knowing I'll survive.'
UNTITLED # 5 by Sigur Rós
Like Bowie in the more terrifying moments of Low, the Icelandic Sigur Rós intone their whole 'Untitled' album (or ( ) to be exact) in a made-up language. The ploy allows us to project our own lives' stories on to the music. And, because we feel a deeper pity for ourselves than for anyone else, that can be very moving indeed.
JUST MY IMAGINATION (RUNNING AWAY WITH ME) by The Temptations
A exquisite essay in gentle self-deception. The guy stares wistfully from his window; each verse floats by on some delicious vision of romance fulfilled. But each verse ends, and the chorus confirms our guy is, of course, merely dreaming. We leave him eternally yearning, forever weaving images of a love-blessed life that he may never know for real.
IN A LONELY PLACE by New Order
The band's first B-side was a Joy Division work-in-progress, re-purposed as an elegy to their late singer Ian Curtis. 'How I wish you were here with me now,' runs the song's pivotal line - it's etched, in fact, into the vinyl's run-off groove. I know of more than one old Factory Records devotee who played this 45, in private, on the passing of Tony Wilson.
SHE'S OUT OF MY LIFE by Michael Jackson
Easy enough to regard him as a carnival sideshow with creepy undertones... Except that he could, from time to time, unveil a number like this, so rich in emotional perception that you would swear he was, somewhere underneath it all, a fully-formed human being.
I GET ALONG WITHOUT YOU VERY WELL by Frank Sinatra
Was this the prototype for all those negative-ironical songs (I'm Not In Love, I Ain't Missing You At All)? The point of course being that Ol' Blue Eyes is not getting along; his life is collapsing into lonely bachelor hell... Frank is a genre unto himself when it comes to That Mood Indigo. Make an appropriate play-list (I recommend Lonely Town and This Nearly Was Mine for a start), pour a tall tumbler of Scotch and your banal whimpering takes on the statuesque proportions of noble tragedy.
THE NEXT LIFE by Suede
A sad song that name-checks Worthing is already half-way there. Pathos and particularity go well together. The Next Life is utterly of that distinctive little world that Brett Anderson lyricised: androgynous teens, all petrol fumes and Woolworths make-up, star-crossed lovers, eloping yet hopeless. Here they are, probably hollering old Bowie songs, motoring down to the South Coast, where they'll 'flog ice creams 'til the company's on its knees'.
NO MORE AUCTION BLOCK by Bob Dylan
On the face of it, this old folk number was a song of liberation, sung by the freed or escaped slaves of North America. But it was also known as Many Thousands Gone -- that is, a remembrance of all the sufferers whose day of freedom never dawned. And Dylan's dignified reading (he drew from it again to write Blowin' In The Wind) sounds indeed more like a requiem than a celebration. Harrowing.
DEATH LETTER BLUES by Son House
Strangely, the blues is almost never depressing. It was invented by people whose lives were already hard enough. So it's really a healing music, which relieves the soul of its sorrows by exposing them to the daylight. On the other hand, some things are just so awful you can only howl, like gnarly old Son House, at the sheer enormity of it all. His 'good old gal' lies lifeless on the slab, not to awake until Judgement Day. His grief is savage; perhaps the most pitiable thing you ever heard.
BIG LOUISE by Scott Walker
The eponymous heroine (or hero) is variously theorised to be a transvestite, a prostitute or even both, mourning ('from her fire escape in the sky') her vanished looks and lovers. I really don't know. But the warmth of Walker's vocals and a gorgeous arrangement lend a world of sombre beauty to his brooding lyric. 'In a world filled with friends,' he croons, 'you lose your way.' An eye-moistening ode to good times gone for good.
THIS IS A LOW by Blur
Does the BBC still do the Shipping Forecast? It used to be unavoidable. But it was never unwelcome. Nothing from the Drama Department could equal the creepy thrill of those grim, distant places (Malin, Cromarty, Dogger...) litanised for those in peril on the sea. Smart of Damon Albarn, I always thought, to adapt their cold, salt-sprayed cadences for this bleakly drifting meditation.
OH I WEPT by Free
Few rock bands have excelled in melancholy, it's not really what rock is there for. But the Free of 1970's Fire And Water, their creative peak, achieved a spirit-wringing depth that still astounds. Oh I Wept ('filled my eyes with silver tears') is perhaps the best of several examples on the LP, whose sorrowful power is only spoiled by the gratingly upbeat finale of All Right Now. Why are so many acts' worst songs their biggest?
DRY YOUR EYES by The Streets
Vulnerability in hip hop is welcome. The weeping strings subside into a slow, loping beat; Skinner steps up to announce 'In one single moment your whole life can turn 'round'; he proceeds, quite rightly, to rhyme it with 'proper sorry frown'. Thus the eternal language of anguish finds a new translator, expressing it for the teen on top of the bus, a teardrop trickling on to her MP3 phone.
INTO THE FIRE by Bruce Springsteen
It's rare that a rock musician deepens your understanding of any moral question or social problem. But Springsteen can, sometimes, because he favours compassionate cameos of individuals over grand political abstractions - see also The Streets Of Philadelphia (AIDS) and Across The Border (migrant labourers). Here, in the tale of a fireman's self-sacrifice on 9/11, he re-affirms the heroic human aspect that was soon forgotten in the aftermath.
TIL I CAN MAKE IT ON MY OWN by Tammy Wynette
Sad songs, truly affecting songs, abound in country music. The country mentality has a fatalistic view of life: heartbreak happens because it goes with the territory. Tammy's five-hankie weeper is a classic of the post-break-up confessional. She's bein' brave, she's suppressing that little choke in her voice, she's lookin' to the future. But, just for now, she's a complete and utter catastrophe.
I THINK IT'S GOING TO RAIN TODAY by Randy Newman
It's been much-covered and sometimes brilliantly, but Newman's own version is unbeatable. It has an almost embarrassing intimacy. Hushed and hoarse, poking listlessly at his piano, he descends into some solitary dungeon of the spirit. Were it not for the questing, swooping string arrangement he puts around it, you would expect the track to falter mid-way and curl up in a ball of private despair.
MAN OF THE WORLD by Fleetwood Mac
One must always stress, for younger viewers, that Peter Green's band of the 1960s was quite unlike the air-brushed Fleetwood Mac of later years. This is soulful British blues, a delicate, electric folk madrigal with a chugging rock eruption at its centre. At the peak of his pop stardom, poor Green sings of his despondency and disillusion: 'There's no one I'd rather be, but I just wish that I had never been born'. I saw him a few years later; he was sleeping in a doorway.
TAKE THE BOX by Amy Winehouse
Break-up numbers are naturally the biggest category of Songs in the Key of Blue. They lend themselves to widescreen performances. But it's the sordid trivia of separation that's dwelt upon here. There's the division of goods into cardboard boxes: the Moschino bra he bought her for Christmas; the Frank Sinatra disc that doubtless soundtracked romantic evenings in. As a blameless symbol of the psycho-drama raging around the room, the humble box is poignantly perfect.
DO WHAT YOU GOTTA DO by The Four Tops
Men among boys... The Tops were not measured by their ho's, bitches, money or guns. Rather, as in this stirring Jimmy Webb song, they valued weirdly archaic concepts like stoicism, generosity of spirit, personal responsibility ('It's my own fault what happens to my heart') and self-denial ('though it may mean I'll never kiss those sweet lips again...').
BLACK EYED DOG by Nick Drake
The black dog is an old emblem of depression but here, in one of Drake's infamous 'four last songs', the beast appears in his doorway as death's emissary, come to lead the singer to another place. Most of Drake's music is beautiful but this is harsh, bereft. If he'd come to see life as a kind of exile - 'I'm growing old and I wanna go home' - here was the moment he saw his way out. Before the year was over, Nick Drake was gone.
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