Culture Slut: The Best Sad Songs Ever Written
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Every year, we look forward to seeing our Spotify Wrapped, the breakdown of the music we play the most on the Spotify music streaming service (well, some of us use Apple music, but no one cares about that). We can’t wait to see quantified figures describing our own listening habits, no, our own personalities, back to us. You think you played the new Lizzo song over a thousand times, and when Spotify tells you it was actually 1376 times you feel vindicated. You love seeing the analysis of your music taste, what genres you listen to most, how many minutes you’ve spent with one artist. You cant wait to proudly display your most played artists if you think they are cool, or share with your friends your truly unhinged listening choices. I had a friend (an editor of a certain zine) have both The Sims 2 soundtrack and the Trolls soundtrack show up in her top five, and if that's not something to be worried about then I don’t know what is.
Personally, I am a devotee of the sad, the gloomy, and the heart wrenching. FKA Twigs’ sad/sexy masterpiece Cellophane has been in my top three most played songs every year since it’s first release, even in years where I hadn't gone through massive breakups. I am an absolute glutton for emotional terrorism and I relish every second of it. On the occasions I get ill and have to take to my bed for a few days, I play soft, mournful choral music and dream about my own death. I’ve even laid out my own fake flowers around my bed, as if it was Valentino’s funeral. I counted down the days before Beth Gibbons’ release of Gorecki’s Symphony of Sorrowful Songs, poised in perfect anticipation for the agonies it could exact on my willing soul. When my five year relationship ended last summer, the only thing I could think of to bring me joy was compiling a playlist of the saddest songs I could find, and then lay in my bed, listening to it, doing nothing else but letting the waves of romantic generational sorrow wash over me.
Songs about heartbreak are by far the best part of any breakup, from the tragic arias of Baroque opera, to the heartfelt soft feminine jazz of the 50s, the torch songs and French chansons of dimly lit smoky cabarets, to the angst-ridden rock ballads of Garbage and No Doubt, I have loved them all. Playing sad songs is an empowering exercise because it allows one to try on another person’s sadness, and then take it off. Its like being a child with a dressing up box overflowing with rich magical costumes, what do you want to be now? A princess trapped by a dragon? An old sea witch plotting against the king? A swashbuckling pirate looking for treasure? As an adult, what kind of sadness do you want to try on? A woman at lunch who sees her husband kissing somebody else? A queen singing her way into a grand suicide? A fool who can never truly fall in love? What even is love? Have you ever truly felt it? Maybe you only thought you did, but in reality you are just as alone as you have always been? Can you ever find it again? Will it ever happen for you? Others, maybe, but you? What kind of lips are these that lied with every kiss, and whispered empty words of love that left me alone like this? Why can’t I fall in love like other people can? Maybe then I’ll know what kind of fool I am.
___STEADY_PAYWALL___
Dear reader, this month I have decided to take you on guided tour of seven of my favourite sad songs, really let yourself go with the January blues, maybe dump your significant other just so you can get the full effect. These are some of my top breakup ballads and hopefully they will be ones that you might not have heard of before, because these underrated gems of female heartbreak can truly still transport us in to new dimensions of satisfying sorrow.
Timi Yuro - Hurt
Lets start with a classic. Released in 1961, Hurt is an emotional, soaring, throaty ballad from a young Italian-American girl who grew up singing in Italian restaurants and nightclubs in LA. Yuro’s delivery is reminiscent of the great Dinah Washington, not afraid to crack with anguish and pain, running effortlessly from the plaintive refrain to a soft and pleading spoken word section. “I'm hurt, much more, ah, much more than you’ll ever know. Yes darling, I’m so hurt because… I still love you so.” Yuro went on to specialise in these kind of heartbreak songs, with her almost masculine contralto wailing. I remember lying in bed listening to the album 18 Hurtin’ Songs and really letting it all out. Truly an underrated star.
Julie London - Guess Who I Saw Today
A true masterpiece I have become obsessed with, this is one of the best tracks from London’s best (in my opinion) albums Love On The Rocks from 1963. The whole album tells a breakup story, from the great How Did He Look, which talks about bumping into an ex boyfriend, to The End Of A Love Affair, which lists the ways she takes her mind off her own heartbreak. Guess Who I Saw Today is London at her best, a middle road between singing and speaking, drawing the listener in, telling the story of a woman who confronts her husband at the end of a long day over drinks at home after she has seen him with his mistress in a cafe at lunch time. It takes it’s time to get to the bite but it’s so good. “Guess who I saw today, my dear! I’ve never been so shocked before, I headed blindly for the door, but they didn’t see me passing through. Guess who I saw today? I saw you.” Other notable versions of this song have been performed by Nancy Wilson and the iconic Eartha Kitt, but it is London’s effortlessly cool delivery that cinches it for me.
Jessye Norman - Dido’s Lament
One of opera’s greatest tragic arias, Henry Purcell composed this mournful farewell for his opera Dido and Aeneas in 1688. It tells the Roman legend of Aeneas, a prince who escapes the destruction of Troy and eventually discovers what would become Italy and the Roman Empire. On his journey he falls in love with the powerful Dido, queen of Carthage, but when he is prompted to leave her and continue his quest, she builds a giant pyre and immolates herself in the flames. This is the aria she sings as she goes to her suicide, talking to her handmaiden. “Thy hand Belinda, darkness shades me, on thy bosom let me rest, more I would but Death invades me; Death is now a welcome guest. When I am laid in earth, may my wrongs create no trouble in thy breast. Remember me, but ah! Forget my fate.” My favourite performance of this is the 1986 recording of the incredible Jessye Norman, a trailblazer for black women in opera, who sadly died recently, in late 2019. Her delivery is incredibly powerful, going from the quiet entreating of her maid to the soaring, swooping, sorrowful notes of the pleas to remember her afterwards. Of course, this piece has been performed by many other grande dames of opera, but my second favourite version was actually sung by New Wave post modern gender anarchist Klaus Nomi, which can be found on youtube.
Margaret Whiting - The Lies of Handsome Men
This became one of my favourite songs the moment I heard it, and I ravenously started devouring every recording and live version of it I could find. The best recording I found was it’s début, sung by Margaret Whiting in 1990. Written by Francesca Blumenthal, the song seems to start off as an overly sentimental love song, but then it starts pivoting into more depressing territory. “I believe in love songs; they seem to know just how I’m feeling. I believe Prince Charming, I never guess he’s double dealing… how my spirits rise, believing in the lies of handsome men.” It is the perfect amount of longing and loneliness, the willingness to endure unknown future pain just to extend the joy of the present moment. The final lines are always the ones that get me: “So I believe in heroes, and I expect my happy ending. Wishing on some rainbows, I pretend he’s not pretending. Some day I’ll get wise, but right now I need the lies of handsome men.” There is a great video of the legendary Blossom Dearie singing this song live, but for some reason she doesn’t include the final verse, which for me was the focal point of the song, so Whiting pipped her to the post for this list.
Garbage - Cup of Coffee
By far the angstiest song on this list, this great rock ballad comes from Garbage’s ground-breaking 2001 album Beautiful Garbage. It starts off slow, haunting, “You tell me you don’t love me over a cup of coffee and I just have to look away,” before it starts picking up the pace, getting stronger as Shirley Manson describes the ways she tries to cope with this feeling of loss. “I smoke your brand of cigarettes and pray that you might give me a call, I lie around in bed all day just staring at the walls, hanging around bars at night wishing I had never been born, and give myself to anyone who wants to take me home.” The way she evokes the feelings of both apathy and recklessness is so striking, it almost feels visceral. “My friends all say they’re worried, I’m looking far too skinny. I’ve stopped returning all their calls.” The wanton self destruction culminates in the final line “It took a cup of coffee to prove that you don’t love me” and the feeling of despondent rejection is so suffocating you almost choke on it.
June Christy - Something Cool
Initially released in 1955, but then rerecorded and re-released in 1960, Christy’s album Something Cool was a perfect example of the cool jazz genre she so effortlessly worked in. The title track is by far my favourite on the album, it tells the story of a woman who stops at bar in the middle of the day and begins flirting with a man who bought her a drink. She starts to reminisce about her life, her lost treasures, her youth, her long-gone lovers, and it’s so compelling, with a real sense of loneliness and and an unhinged madness bubbling just below the surface. “Something cool, I’d like to order something cool. It’s so warm here in town, and the heat gets me down, yes I’d like something cool. My, it’s nice to simply sit and rest a while. Now I know its a shame but I cant remember your name, but I remember your smile. I don’t ordinarily drink with strangers, I most usually drink alone, but you were so awfully nice to ask me and I’m so terribly far from home.” The song was written by Bill Barnes as part of his musical education, inspired by the iconic character of Blanche DuBois in the Tennessee Williams play A Streetcar Named Desire, and it truly captures the characters isolation and loose grip on reality. “Well, it’s through, its just a little memory I had, one that I almost forgot because the weather’s so hot and I’m feeling so bad about a date, oh, wait, I’m such a fool. You’re just a guy who stopped to buy me something cool.” There is an incredible live recording of Christy singing this song on the television show Playboy’s Penthouse Party in 1959, in a lounge surrounded by elegant party goers and Hugh Hefner himself. The pain, the power, the nuanced loneliness Christy evokes with this performance is incredible, I urge you to find it on youtube.
Shirley Bassey - What Now My Love
It’s the last song on this list so we are going out big. Bassey has one of my most favourite voices of all time, grand enough to fill your entire body with vibrations, but expressive enough to leave one feeling devastated and post-orgasmic all at once. It was hard to pick just one song, but I feel this one says all that needs to be said on this subject. It starts quietly but it builds and builds into an anthemic call to arms, an army of the broken hearted calling out for meaning in this lost and lonely world. “What now my love, now that you’ve left me, how can I live for another day? Watching my dreams turn in to ashes, and my hopes in to beds of clay? Once I could see, once I could feel, now I’m numb, I’ve become unreal!” Other Bassey high scorers for me are the furious I Who Have Nothing and the painfully self-recriminating What Kind Of Fool Am I, truly a master of choosing only the best songs for her legendary voice.
Why do we love sad songs so much, when there is already so much to feel bad about in our everyday lives? It is because when sadness is packaged like this, with a definite cause and a definite reaction, maybe even a resolution, it becomes deliciously straightforward. Depression and Sadness in real life is always wrapped up in confusion, emptiness, paralysis, but sad songs are perfectly crafted morsels of emotion designed to satisfy what we ourselves have been looking for, whether that's a release of feelings, companionship in our misery or just a distraction from our own pain. The best thing about sad songs is that, unlike the tragedies we face in the rest of the world, they end.
Words & Collages: Misha MN
