All I wanted was to sing the saddest song #3

I've never acknowledged the AV Club's list of sad songs as the inspiration for this. I really should have. I don't agree with all of the choices, but I spent the night I read it listening to my selections and choking up. In the spirit of that, this is an unthemed list.

1. Billy Bragg - Between the Wars. There's a core of hope in this song, but its deep there. Mostly, its a resigned hymn, with flashes of defiance. Even the anthem-y part at the end "Call out a craftsman/ bring me a draftsman/build me a path..." ends in the wary plea of "sweet moderation/heart of this nation/ desert us not/ we are between the wars." The spare guitar and Bragg's nasal Essex voice add to the melancholy.
   
2. Tom Smith - A Boy and His Frog. I think it was Randy Milholland from Something Positive who said that if you don't tear up when you hear this, you don't have a soul. It's so sad, that the video on youtube is flagged as "inappropriate to minors.
3. Elliot Smith - Miss Misery. Saying that Elliot Smith writes the occasional sad song is like saying that you'd prefer not to be punched in the sack. Regardless, Miss Misery is the song that comes unbidden into one's head when one can't get out of bed in the morning, or can't put the vodka back in the freezer at night.
   
4. Ben Folds Five - Cigarette. That sandpaper feeling behind his eyes. That's what I always think of when I hear this song. Fred Jones is so tired, and so sad, and so worried. It's a perfect vignette.
   
5. Wilco - I am trying to break your heart. This is another song tied to a specific memory - in this case, lying on the bottom bunk, staring at the white particle board above, thinking about how awesome the line "I want to hold you in the bible-black pre-dawn" is, trying not to think about what was keeping me awake. The song slowly unravels as it nears its end, it's quite good.
   

All I wanted was to sing the saddest song #2 - The Music of St. Blake

Blake Schwarzenbach holds a special place in the history of sad songs. Jawbreaker put out some damn sad music, as did Jets to Brazil, especially on their first album. It's a testament to Schwarzenbach's skill as a writer that these songs work.

Jawbreaker:
Sea Foam Green - The real kick in the teeth for this song is the bridge: "Tried to drink you off my mind, I just got wasted. It only made the pain that much more acute - cute isn't strong enough a word, unintentionally gorgeous." Those two sentences capture, better than anything I've read, how it feels to want to give up on someone, but finding that the harder you try, the harder it is. That last bit where acute pain goes to unintentionally gorgeous, is brilliant; at the bottom of the bottle that sick feeling in the pit of your stomach and your desire get all mixed up, and you're no longer sure if you feel good or bad.

Accident Prone - Where "Sea Foam Green" suggest a specific moment - for me at least, there's a definite memory that I can see when I close my eyes - "Accident Prone" is a different, longer kind of sad. "It hasn't been my day for a couple years, what's a couple more?" Everything about this song - that plodding bassline, that deliberately slow guitar in the verses, - sounds beat up, and then it builds and builds, and just when it gets unbearable, it explodes into the final chorus: "a near miss or a close call, I keep a room at the hospital, I scratch my accidents to the wall...I got to you there was nothing left, I got to you, there was nothing left." It's heartbreaking. It's also the only song I've ever seen make my father tear up - his first words to me after hearing it were "powerful stuff." I agree.

Jets To Brazil:
Conrad - What happens when you borrow some melodic material from the one Beatles song capable of causing actual melancholy, and then add that to terribly sad words about suicide? You get a song that's amazingly tragic. The story of a girl who checks into a motel to kill herself, told in a flurry of images - "a week up front, asks not to be bothered," "readies herself, apologizing to the motel maids," "warming her wrists, in promising water," "double edged and super-blue, vertically letting the life from you" - pulls back, with the tune of "Nowhere Man" to paralyzed, watching angels, hovering near the shower-head maybe, knowing "only that they can't quite tear themselves from the view." It's that pull-back, watching the song with the angels, that makes it so devastating.

I Typed For Miles - Pure desperation. The strained vocals, for one, get that message across. It's a slow descent into insanity, from the comparisons about the narrator's craft - writing is "like figure skating, like asphyxiating" - to the denial of "leave me here to my devices, the call could come at any time," to "tied my ankles to the table legs with wire, he can't write so much as type" and the final, cathartic outburst of "they're playing love songs on your radio tonight, I don't get those songs on mine - you keep fucking up my life." It's not related to anything I remember, but it's a moving portrait.

All I wanted was to sing the saddest song #1.

There are sad songs. There have always been sad songs. Sad songs are good songs, we like listening to them because either we're sad ourselves, or we have been. Listen to a sad song when you're happy, and you feel a pang of sympathy (sometimes followed with a grudging sense of the singer ruining your fun). Listen to a sad song when you're sad, and you don't feel so alone. If I were more classically inclined or more of a douche-bag, I'd have a big section here on tragedy and catharsis and Nietzsche and everything, but I'm not. I'm just a big enough douche-bag to tell you that there's an entire book of the Bible dedicated to sad songs, the Lamentations of Jeremiah, and that settings of the O Vos Omnes (Oh, all you who pass by, stop and listen, see if there is any sorrow like my sorrow) were especially popular in the Renaissance.

I like sad songs. When I'm happy, sad songs elicit a pang of sympathy. When I'm sad, sad songs are sort of comforting. Everyone, secretly, has one sad song that they love.

I have many.