Do sad songs make us feel better?

Adam Brent Houghtaling explores melancholy music and how it affects us.

|
Charles Peterson, Courtesy of Don Peterson/ITVS/AP
Billie Holiday's 'Strange Fruit' topped Adam Brent Houghtaling's list of the saddest songs ever released.

Adam Brent Houghtaling, a New York-based author, should be in quite a sour mood by now. After all, he spent months listening to the saddest music ever made, from sorrowful symphonies to tearjerker Billie Holliday tunes to just about every Leonard Cohen song ever.

But Houghtaling, author of the new book "This Will End in Tears: The Miserabilist Guide to Music," is actually pretty chipper, all things – and all songs – considered. His fascinating examination of centuries of downer music is getting plenty of attention, and his ranking of the Top 100 Saddest Songs has spawned debate.

I asked Houghtaling to explain what he's learned and ponder why we like to turn to blue notes, especially when we're notably blue.

Q: What makes sad songs unique?

A: Sad songs are a really intimate thing. They're not something you listen to with all your friends at a dinner party or when you're hanging out at a lake house with your buddies. You're doing it by yourself.

If you're listening to a lot of sad music, it's because you're not in a great state of mind. You've just gotten your heart broken or suffered some kind of loss. It becomes intimate, but it's also comforting in a way.

Q: Can sad songs actually be good for us when we're feeling down?

A: There's this idea that listening to sad songs may drag us deeper into our despair. But it may also help us go deeper into a despair and focus on whatever the problem is that brought us to that point.

Q: Do you mean a kind of catharsis?

 A: I found catharsis to be a very tricky topic, but yeah, it's the idea that when you connect with an artist or a song, you feel like someone else is out there, someone has gone through this before, you're not alone.

There's a lot of ways that sad songs help us get through the despair and put us back on track.

Q: How did researching your book affect you personally?

A: It took me a couple of years, if not a little more, to write the book, and I was deeply immersed in the saddest stuff I could find, listening to it over and over again.

My mood depended on what was going on in my life. If everything was going OK, it didn't affect me much. But if a couple things went wrong, it didn't help.

It wasn't always the best thing for me. But I had a deadline.

Q: Do you feel like you're celebrating sad songs?

A: I want to celebrate being melancholy in the ruminative sense, not depression itself.

That's nothing I want to make light of and really affects people's lives in a terrible way. When you're depressed, you can't do a heck of a lot and you don't feel a lot of joy.

But when I'm kind of melancholic, I can still do all that stuff. I feel peaceful and comforted when I'm in that head space.

I wanted to make a case for enjoying that and not trying to end it. These moments of sadness are an important part of life, and you shouldn't necessarily try to chase them away at all costs.

Q: What did you think about when you developed your Top 100 Saddest Songs list, which is topped by "Adagio for Strings" (composed by Samuel Barber) and "Strange Fruit" (sung by Billie Holiday)?

A: I wanted to include artists who really owned sadness, not just people who did a couple of sad songs.

Q: Do the artists behind these songs tend to have difficult lives?

A: It just makes sense that artists who deal with emotional turmoil would have a truer, stronger sense of the material than someone who doesn't necessarily know sadness beyond a bad day or weekend. Instead, it's someone who knows a bad year or a decade.

Q: What makes a good sad song?

A: There isn't any one thing on its own that does it.

I looked at slow tempo, which can do a good job of slowing your heart rate down. But ambient music has slow tempo too, and it's not necessarily sad. I looked at minor chords, but there are plenty of upbeat songs that have minor chords. Then there are lyrics, but there are plenty of raging songs that are about loss, grief and heartbreak.

Then I got into the little things, like how someone's voice can help convey a certain kind of sadness. There are these kinds of really beat-up and broken voices, like Billie Holliday's in her last years, that convey "I've been through it all, and this is a story I have to tell."

There's also something about low-fi music, this idea that this is the honest truth: We didn't shine this up or produce it for you. It's coming from a kid in his bedroom with a broken heart.

Q: Would you prescribe sad songs to a sad person?

A: I don't think I'd have to. They probably would have found them on their own.

To listen to Houghtaling's selection of the saddest songs of all time, sign up for the music service Spotify and head to this link: http://spoti.fi/NqWUwq.

Randy Dotinga is a Monitor contributor.

You've read  of  free articles. Subscribe to continue.
Real news can be honest, hopeful, credible, constructive.
What is the Monitor difference? Tackling the tough headlines – with humanity. Listening to sources – with respect. Seeing the story that others are missing by reporting what so often gets overlooked: the values that connect us. That’s Monitor reporting – news that changes how you see the world.

Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

If you’re looking for bran muffin journalism, you can subscribe to the Monitor for $15. You’ll get the Monitor Weekly magazine, the Monitor Daily email, and unlimited access to CSMonitor.com.

QR Code to Do sad songs make us feel better?
Read this article in
https://www.csmonitor.com/Books/chapter-and-verse/2012/0824/Do-sad-songs-make-us-feel-better
QR Code to Subscription page
Start your subscription today
https://www.csmonitor.com/subscribe