11: Comfort of Madness (Favorite Sad Songs)

Some days hit harder than others. I typically float through life on a 90/10 split of easy, successful days to difficult days where I struggle. The problem, I've found, is that there's so many fucking days in a week! I don't know anybody who would vote to keep Tuesday through Thursday, assuming all relevant programming was rescheduled. Because there's so many days, by my math, someone who is doing great 90% of the time will have more than one bad day every two weeks! I guess it is no surprise I still frequently tear up on the drive into work. Or the drive home, walk to the mailbox, or the PM cleaning of the litter box...although that's for a different reason.

It is almost always music that gets me. I have hundreds of songs I associate with people, places, memories, and dreams. One reason I have such a love affair with music is because even the songs I hate can elicit happy memories, or make me laugh. Sara and I just bonded over my hatred of this song that I'm now always singing: 

It's absolute juicy garage but I'll never forget it AND it is yet another thing in life to laugh about

But only the songs I love make me cry. I guess I don't know enough about how crying evolved to fully understand what it means. There's so much emotional flexibility in music; it can be the same old song but with a different meaning since you've been _____. We're able to appreciate an individual song or album on many levels or only the ones that fit our agenda. The combination of lyrics, music, performance, and the creativity involved can hit you all at once, build over time, or change as you change. 

For this list, I included a mix of old "favorites" and songs that fucked me up right the first time.

I Prevail - Alone (2016)

The sun had just barely peeled back the black when I took the onramp from the airport loop to get on the highway back to Fort Collins. I had dropped Sara off for an early flight back to Wisconsin to visit friends. I was busy with work, not taking care of myself physically or emotionally, and definitely not up for a trip anywhere. There were so many changes in my life but I still had the same worries about myself. When this song came on the radio, the opening chords seemed to rise like fog from the dark outside the car. The powerfully bare and emotional delivery made me think it was Christian rock, but the subject was a little more vague and much darker than usual. It turned out they were a really forgettable metalcore band from, of all places, Michigan. This song is a haunting look at loss and loneliness with a nice vocal performance. Nothing out of this world but it did a number on me. 

FireLake - Dirge For the Planet (2005)

A weird song with an even weirder back story! FireLake was a Ukrainian metal band from the early 2000s that no one had ever heard of. The guitarist for the band also worked for a game design company and they used some of the bands songs in their big game Stalker: Shadow of Chernobyl. Against all odds, the game was a big success and the bands music reached a wider audience. This song is a delicate acoustic version of an earlier work. The evocative lyrics describe a crystalline vision of armageddon, where mankind destroys all life and then looks back in sadness. Not recommended for the drive in to work!!

Pete Yorn - Country (2009)

I first heard this song over satellite radio while working in the grocery store. It was generic and radio friendly and I didn't think much of it. Fast forward a few 80-hour work weeks and I was belting it out in the cookie aisle. It has a good dynamics for an acoustic love song. The track is layered and the background vocals suggest the space and freedom of the country life that Pete is singing so longingly for. "In the days when we were living in the city, it seemed that we were talking more. I can never love you like the way you love me, and these are things I can't ignore. You know I never lost before."

This is a song about hindsight in love, the incredibly painful and inapplicable growth that comes from realizing you could have treated someone better. I find most of his music trite and saccharine but I love this one

Tom Petty - Crawling Back to You (1994)

The Wildflowers album was very popular in my childhood home, all four of us liked it and we played the hell out of it. I had mostly positive associations with this song...until I became an adult. It was 2007. I was living alone in Middleton, driving through the dark swamp backroads to Sun Prairie for work on a daily basis. Up to seven days a week I was getting up before sunrise and getting home after dark. So, really, everything was making me cry. But one morning around Halloween that year, I heard this song for the first time in several years on the way to work. "I'm so tired of being tired. Sure as night will follow day, most things I worry about never happen anyway." It all hit me at once. The "you" we are all constantly crawling back to, the confusion of modern life, the search for atonement. Now that Tom's dead I can just barely listen to it. To me, it is the realest song of the realest songwriter and it just delivers too well. 

Junior Boys - Count Souvenirs (2006)

Another greatest "hit" from the darkest days of my mid-00s. I heard it on college radio in Madison on the way home from work and like many, many people before me, I wound up crying in the McDonald's drive-thru. Fifteen or so years later and I've still never heard a more haunting, weird, forlorn song. The fact that it is wrapped up and presented as a Pet Shop Boys tribute of 80s synth and flow makes it all the more bewildering. Like most of these songs, there's something about the production and delivery that sounds so human and real that you forget you're consuming a product and you just feel something. In this case, you're tricked into mourning the loss of the unknown. 

Ryan Adams - Blossom (2005)

What can I say, I just loved the show "Blossom" as a kid and I never got over it being cancelled. This song may or may not be about Blossom Russo (it is) but it is one of my favorites and an absolute emotional tour de force. "Without anyone to love you, what will you blossom into? Without anyone to hold you, how will you grow?" If you're at the point in this list where you're thinking I'm just an emotional wreck and none of this applies to you, set this song to a video of sad shelter animals and get back to me. Ryan Adams is an expert at packing in the colors and this song is the before, during, and after of a storm, sunshine after rain, and the growth that comes after.

Staind - So Far Away (2003)

This is the saddest happy song I've ever heard! There are countless reasons for me to hate this song: cheesy nu-metal production, the worst band name this side of Puddle of Mudd, overplayed radio schlock. It doesn't matter: this song cuts to my emotional core and forces me to feel. It is also a dynamic song because it can work for depressed people who identify with the first half of the song's emotional arc and people who have overcome depression to identify with the second half. "I can forgive, and I'm not ashamed to be the person that I am today." Seriously one of the most powerful lyrics you could ever hear as a young adult, and the fact that it came from a nu-metal band named "Staind"makes me cherish it all the more. 

NOFX - She's Gone (1992)

Like all the best NOFX songs, She's Gone is loaded with imagery invoking lyrics, dynamic shifts in tone and tempo, and a maniacal vocal that blends pop harmony with punk intensity. The band explores some of the darkest corners of poverty and the degradation of humanity that typically accompanies it. Their ability to do so to a catchy beat and three part harmonies has always amazed me, and although the quality of their songs has varied drastically over the years, I can't think of another band who could pull of a song like She's Gone. "In the darkness she sees definition. In the silence she hears someone calling. After nightmares, she lies in bed screaming. There's no reaction. There's no one listening. There's no one there. She's gone."

Seahaven - Black and White (2011)

The saddest (and best) song on a depressive album called "Winter Forever". WOW. I'm still not over the fact that the rest of this band's songs weren't as impressive, that's how hard this song hit me the first time I heard it. The guitar interplay, the strange timing and lilt on the vocals, and the lyrics all caught my attention at once. After several listens, it became one of my favorite songs that year. It has perhaps the best lyrics about loss I've ever heard, and to say something new about a breakup or disconnection at this point in songcraft is incredibly impressive. There's something literary and timeless in the words, and because it is my website and we may have some readers who don't want to listen to music, I'm posting them all here:

She said, "Why is it that you cannot seem to cough up a reason as to why you threw me into the winter to freeze?"

I said, "I cannot deliver to you a simple answer for it is far to complex for my complex to conceive. I just let you go, to let you go. I ran away, found drugs. It's just I don't think you deserve what I was, or more importantly now, what I have become."

So now you say, you say, you say...

"Don't you know that I am exactly what you wanted? I still am what you want, and what you need.

But you seem to have forgotten the promises you promised, where you do not forget about me/"

You chase the time apart with alcohol and a fresh vibrant flame, though I do question the value within the hue. While I'm held in the arms of a friend, nearly drank myself to death, I spill of how its always been about you.

That morning we made the sweetest love. I walked you outside to watch the sun as it rose to resemble you and I. 

Days later the moon shone upon your lies

Hurry, hurry, hurry like I

Scurry, Scurry, Scurry away

Hurry, Hurry, Hurry before I get carried away

Hurry, hurry, hurry like I

Scurry, Scurry, Scurried away

Hurry, Hurry, Hurry like I got carried away

the Beatles - Let It Be (1970)

Whether this is actually a sad song is pretty dubious, but I do know I cannot listen to it without tearing up. I sort of saved the best for last because this is on my Mount Rushmore of songs that have the ability to stir up emotion and take the listener on a fucking journey. Make sure you listen to this version, it is the 2009 remaster and I think the best production compromise of pomp and restraint. I associate this song with the inevitability of death and the necessity of ignoring that to live a happy life. On an almost supernatural level the song speaks to individuals in dark places and shines a light. Not a light of escape or distraction, but one of acceptance and the peace therein. "For though they may be parted, there is still a chance that they will see." In other words, no, things might not be better tomorrow - but they might be. The ability to find faith in a higher power, whatever that means to you, is the key to relinquishing control and embracing acceptance, forgiveness, and hope. The Beatles are themselves a higher power for a lot of people, and this song is their crowning achievement in both commercial pop songcraft and socio-religious message. The song says everything, beautifully: don't sweat the small stuff, and it's all small stuff. 

Thank you for reading some or all of this. Readership is down from very low to very, very low but it doesn't matter. I have a purpose and won't break my promise.

Lots of love to you, your families, and your pets :)

-Jack