What is your favorite sad song?
I recently put together a new issue of Be About It Zine, and “your favorite sad song” is a question I posed to the writers who contributed pieces for this new issue. When I ask for contributor bios I like to keep it simple: name + location + some random question that I think up. For this issue, it seemed appropriate to keep the random question music related, and thus “favorite sad song.”
If you’re unfamiliar, every issue of Be About It Zine has a theme, a prompt, which is usually a word or phrase. The last edition of the zine was “Britney Spears Blackout,” a theme I chose because I love the album, and because which ended up being a nice tribute to the pop princess who has been fighting a legal battle with her conservatorship the past 10 years or so.
The theme for our current issue, the 18th edition of the zine, is “a song you listen to in order to remember something.” We got a lot of great responses to this prompt, I really love the different directions everyone took. The way we experience music and memory is so powerful. The writing in this zine has been a joy to read, and I am happy to share it with you. You can snag a copy for yourself for $3 on the brand new Be About It Press website, and you can read selections on the Be About It Press blog.
I decided last minute to write a piece for the zine, and when it came time for me to write a bio I got stumped by my own question. What’s my favorite sad song? I first wanted to pick a Songs:Ohia/Jason Molina song, but all of his music is actually incredibly hopeful. Even his songs that absolutely slay me like "Blue Chicago Moon" and "Almost Was Good Enough" have hope.
A lot of the songs I think of as sad might be better described as "angsty" or "reservedly hopeful." Is "Be Quiet And Drive (Far Away)" by Deftones a sad song? Maybe the acoustic version from the Little Nicky soundtrack is more sad? What about "Summerland" by Everclear? I love that song, it strikes something nostalgic and wistful within me, but is it sad?
I know that true sad songs exist. Maybe I just don't like them. I prefer that painful nostalgia to actual misery. I don't like sad movies either. I like happy endings.
In the end I chose “Waterloo Sunset” by The Kinks, a song that can actually make me cry. I made a Youtube playlist of all the contributors’ sad songs, which you can listen to here. I opted for live versions, which I feel like always offer something unique and more of a raw emotion.
Here is the piece I wrote for Be About It Zine #18:
HIRAETH
I've ruined so much music that I love by intentionally listening to it during particularly rotten periods of my life. The replay value is not taken into consideration while in these bouts, and perhaps I should try to stop myself the next time my mood is sour and I go reaching for that Jason Molina album. Maybe try meditating instead. Music is powerful and transformative, and I don't want to associate what I otherwise love with bad memories.
That's not what I want to talk about right now, though. What I want to talk about is that feeling that can happen when I hear a song and it takes me somewhere and gets me missing something I've never even experienced.
There are words for this feeling. Not in English, but the word exists in other languages. In Portuguese it is saudade, a profound nostalgia or melancholic longing for something or someone absent, combined with a repressed knowledge that it might never be had again. In Welsh it is hiraeth, a deep and irrational bond felt with a time, era, place, or person; a home that never was.
There's a bunch of songs that give me this feeling, and when I find one I hold onto it, add it to a playlist, and listen to it on loop. It helps me write, I think. It is my favorite feeling. It puts me in an otherworldly headspace that is entirely fictional and unique to me. It’s something personal carved from a common space. It’s my own interpretation, like returning to a scene in a beloved book and getting especially consumed in whatever the passage is not saying.
One of these songs for me is "Loud Places" by Jamie xx, a deep house/future garage track that I heard once on a "songs you'll like" curated playlist on google play music (RIP). I like to listen to it at high volume and on repeat so that I can dwell in it. I want to stay in the place that the song makes for me, the place that I find when I listen to it. I want to retread the path it takes from beginning to end and back to the beginning.
It is probably one of the theme songs of the novel I am currently writing, one of the songs I listen to while I write to stay in the zone. The song is about yearning for a connection, and it so perfectly stirs that feeling within me. It’s something that I desperately want to translate into my characters and their story.
When I listen, I get taken to a dark crowded club where no one is looking at me, but I'm looking into the faces of everyone I pass to find something familiar. A face flashes by that I almost recognize but cannot name. A cavity opens up inside my body that I can almost start filling when I try writing about it, but the more I try the deeper it becomes and the more lost and wondrous I feel. I have an irrational bond with this song and how it affects me. It contains a buried understanding that is impossible for me to fully describe.
Music really does something that writing cannot do. When I try to capture it onto the page it’s like I’ve left something behind, but I’m not really any further from where I started. I can try with my words, but I can’t quite get there. I won't stop trying to get there.