‘A song that makes you sad’
This is a tricky one for me, because I quite like wallowing in a good sad song when I’m feeling very down, and it always cheers me up. It’s not schadenfreude: quite the opposite, in fact; it’s the feeling of connectedness in sadness, in feeling that it’s not just me. Does that make sense? It does to me, because it’s the whole point, somehow, of music or poetry or books or any form of artistic communication. It’s like that marvellous line by CS Lewis: ‘We read to know that we are not alone.’
I am, though, going to mention three songs. As they say on TV talent shows, ‘in no particular order.’
‘Suzanne’ by Leonard Cohen makes me sad. It makes me sad because, although it’s a song I like, it’s very evocative as one of the first songs that ever really ‘registered’ with me, when I was a very small child and my Dad had the record it was on… that album and ‘Tapestry’ by Carole King made me really sit up and take notice of songs which took you into a whole other world and wove a story around you. I suppose I could say that ‘Tapestry’ by Carole King makes me sad too. Both songs make me recall with otherworldly clarity sitting on the floor of our sitting room in Belfast, as a small child, listening intently to the stories I think my parents assumed I wouldn’t notice… oranges all the way from China, and trying to call someone back when it had grown too late. I remember keeping up the pretence of playing with my bears or my toy cars or whatever it was I was ostensibly doing, so my Dad wouldn’t turn the music off. I’m not sure you can ever really recapture a magic that pure in adult life. Certainly not as often as you do when you’re a child. And the loss of that magic, and the sadness of those two stories, are things that make me sad.
‘Martha’ by Tom Waits makes me sad. I went through such a Tom Waits (and Leonard Cohen, and Bob Dylan, and Jim Morrison, and Neil Young…) phase in sixth form and at university. It really was quite ridiculous. My friends were all listening to Billy Joel and Phil Collins and there I was with my black-covered tapes and my eyeliner and my DMs and my pretentious illusions of being all deep and thinking about stuff. Stuff like, you know, what did it all mean and what were we doing here and what was it all for. Can we ever gain a sense of irony without going through a pretentious late-teen phase and coming out the other side, intact? I’m not sure. But again ‘Martha’ takes me back to a room. My room in university, in college, in my last year, coming up to finals, when I was listening to an awful lot of other things as well… but when, late at night, after talking to friends or studying late or finishing an essay, something mellow would have to be put on the stereo, and Tom Waits’ ‘Martha’ (and the album on which it belonged) often felt just right. It’s an odd song. Somehow the verses and the bridges and the choruses only half seem to match: the verses are so bleak and the chorus is quite uplifting, almost as if he cheers up midway through the song. I loved university: the study, the people, the life, the place, and it still makes me sad, years later, that it’s all over. And listening to a song like ‘Martha’, even though I don’t like it at all as much as I did back then, encapsulates that nostalgic sense of regret and crystallises it into just over three minutes.
‘Linden Arden Stole the Highlights’ by Van Morrison makes me sad. This is one I discovered about four or five years ago, from a then friend who pointed me towards it as a song which was special to him. I thought I knew Van Morrison’s work reasonably well, what with him being such a local hero to anyone from Belfast… but this is from quite an obscure early album. It’s a good song: quite short, another song that tells a story, with the typical Morrison mix of melody and melancholy. It makes me sad because the friendship which led me to discover the song is now dead. I have never figured out exactly why, though I still don’t think the friendship’s death was really my fault. The song tells the story of a man of contradictions - a man who loved going to church and yet was a drinking man, a man who pretty much embodied the conflict between good and evil. And I think my friend was a bit like that too, and this conflict made ordinary things like maintaining a friendship just one thing too many to do. I don’t know. I don’t think I ever will know. But I do know that it still makes me sad, years later, when I stop to think about it, and that this song sums it all up and sums my friend up too.
I’m so throroughly miserable now, after writing all that, that I’m going to have to listen to my favourite ‘sad song in which I find great consolation’, Leonard Cohen’s ‘Famous Blue Raincoat’, to make myself feel better…
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