The New Sad

In college, my best friend told me that she thought I’d be a lot happier if I didn’t listen to such depressing music. Moping around the dorm listening to PJ Harvey and Tori Amos and Fiona Apple was no way to live one’s life, she said. She prescribed a regimen of quirky pop-punk (Pain), endearingly bizarre shock rock (Mindless Self Indulgence), upbeat emo (pre-OC Phantom Planet), and all manner of ska. I listened to a lot of good music, but I can’t say that it worked. I still went back to what she called “sad bastard music.”

To be honest, sometimes it’s kind of nice to be sad. It’s a sort of cocooning, familiar feeling, just letting go and allowing yourself to feel not-ok. I’m a little bit sad at the moment, and these are the songs I’m listening to. They’re self-indulgent and self-pitying, and really really beautiful. And they’re sort of the only thing keeping me on my feet.

“9 Crimes” – Damien Rice
I think this is probably the saddest song I know at the moment. It sounds like the end of the world, the sort of thing you’d hear amidst the looted, burned out, crumbling ruins of, I don’t know, your heart, once all the fighting has stopped, in the quiet aftermath, once the dust settles. It sounds helpless and hopeless.

“Don’t Forget Me” – Way Out West
Leave it to the Grey’s Anatomy soundtrack to introduce an electro tinged tearjerker like this. It kind of makes me imagine my life as one long gray winter day where I’m leaving something behind, letting it go, it’s out of my hands. Maybe it’s snowing and it’s all in slow-motion.

“Grey” and “Welcome To” – Ani Difranco
Ani Difranco does sad in a way that not many other people do. It’s not about a break-up. It’s not about a broken heart. Sadness, Ani style, is about a broken spirit. It’s about exhaustion and ennui and self-pity and the persistence of such things, beyond the circumstantial. Nothing makes it better, “no amount of stoned makes you feel ok.” It’s a sadness that lives in your bones and never ever leaves, no matter how good things get. Listening to these two songs, in my opinion the saddest in her vast catalogue, it’s hard not to mourn. Not for something lost, but for something never found.

“Love Too Soon” – PJ Harvey
This one’s just unapologetically melodramatic. Very woe is me! Very soap opera. Very tongue in cheek. Still, it’s kind of a lovely song, and in the right mood it gets me more than a little misty-eyed.

“Colorblind” – Counting Crows
Remember Counting Crows? The goofy overweight white dude with the dreads? I barely do. But “Colorblind” is a little masterpiece, if you ask me. Utterly devastating, and the imagery is stunning. “Coffee black and egg white…taffy stuck and tongue tied/stutter shook and uptight.” It makes me think of ghosts and abandoned people.

“Language” – Scott Matthew
When it’s quiet, “Language” wraps around you like a blanket. It’s a lullaby. Gently plucking guitar and Scott Matthew’s velvety soft voice sort of ease the endlessly spinning thoughts in your head. And you just drift off to sleep.

“Half Boyfriend” – Jay Brannan
“Are you ok?” he asks.

“Yeah, why?”

“Well, I listened to the song on your MySpace page.”

It’s funny when you find a song that so closely mirrors what you’re feeling, even down to the specific circumstances that made you feel that way. That’s the type of song you put on your MySpace page to subtly, maybe a little passive aggressively, let someone know that he’s broken your heart. Well, maybe not broken it. Hairline fractured it. But if we’re talking about failed romance here, I have to say that at a certain point, if there’s someone who cannot, for whatever reason, just let you love him, well, you can love this song instead.