Paige Travis: Sad Songs Say So Much
“Your favorite music, well, it just makes you sad. But you like it because you feel special that way.” — Clem Snide, “Your Favorite Music”
I can’t say exactly when this attraction to musical masochism began. My earliest favorite sad songs were about lost or ill-fated love. “Endless Summer Nights” by Richard Marx, circa 1988, comes to mind because I heard it over the loudspeaker in Kroger this week. That song and its video epitomized my 8th grade longing to have actually loved and lost, to feel legitimate heartache for something other than the unknown. “I remember how you loved me. Time was all we had until the day we said goodbye.” Even the title was heartbreaking: Endless? Ha! Summer? Never lasts! Nights? Dark and ruined by the light of day! Ugh! Richard’s pain was real, and, oh, how I wanted my small ache to be authentic.
As I’d so passionately hoped, I did experience some amount of valid heartbreak over the eight to 10 years after the Marx era and earned the right to wallow in sad songs. I discovered the mother lode of despair on CD when a college boyfriend (an art major, no less) introduced me to American Music Club. “Why don’t you be good for something,” begins “Gratitude Walks,” the first song on Mercury (1991). With his eternal self-loathing, Mark Eitzel became my sad-sack guru, my group leader for all things pathetic. If I wanted to feel sorry for myself (an argument, a failed test, a cloudy day), Mark was there to nudge the knife in a little deeper: “Just get me back to the leper colony, cause that’s where you left my heart.” The blade actually touched the bone.
It may have been around this time that it first occurred to me—a music junkie but not an actual musician—that the songs themselves might contain some special inflammatory agent, some ingredient that caused my chest and therefore my heart to seize up, resulting in actual physical but mostly just emotional pain. Minor chords and the minor key seemed to be the culprits. I still have no idea what these really are, but my knowledge of their names leads me to identify them although I’m deaf to their presence. Nothing about this connection between notes and mood is mentioned in the Wikipedia entry for “minor key,” but I know they’re up to something.
I finally came to grips with my conscious desire to seek out such music in the early winter of 1996 when I first became acquainted with Nick Drake’s Pink Moon. Here’s a testament to tone and intonation: although I could hardly tell what words Nick was singing: I knew—knew!—he was miserable (he’d killed himself in 1973, hadn’t he?), hence he was my new master of melancholy. Listening to Nick Drake’s voice murmur and lilt along with the plucking of acoustic guitar strings, I felt an undeniable urge to splay my body across the floor (at the time, horrendous brown shag carpet) and throw my blank stare at the ceiling. No fetal positions or clenched fists. No specific reason for suffering. Just a helpless surrender to music in the achingly gorgeous key of sad.
That’s when I knew my search would never end for songs whose traits I can’t quite explain except that they make me want to lie on the floor. (And now that I have a cat and don’t vacuum that much, the descriptor is mostly metaphorical.) Radiohead has kept me supplied for years. Ryan Adams offered up a classic with Heartbreaker. Gillian Welch and David Rawlings’ harmonies consistently put me in the basement. Recently, Ray LaMontagne and Jose Gonzalez have perfected the genre with intensely quiet and deeply emotional songs that are really difficult to listen to at work (where the floor is even more gross than at home). Despite the obstacles, I still seek out sad music. It hurts, but it hurts so good.
Paige M. Travis, publicist for A.C. Entertainment, has a real problem accepting that O.K. Computer is almost 10 years old. And she encourages everyone to come see Jose Gonzalez at the Bijou Theatre on Sunday, September 24 at 8 p.m.