Saddest Song in the World Challenge!

[caley]

It's the DVDVR 2014 Sad Song Challenge.

 

Rules

-1 Song per post

-You need to give a reason not just "Makes me sad"

-A Youtube would be helpful

 

Go!

[caley]

Starting off with my favourite sad song!

Red House Painters - Katy Song: So sad!  It's a suitably downbeat simple song with Mark Kozelek's voice coming in a low, stilted tone like it's killing him to get every word out.  And the lyrics!  "Glass on the pavement under my shoe/Without you, it's all my life amounts to" and "I know tomorow, you'll be somewhere in London/Living with someone/You've got some kind of family there to turn to/And that's more than I could ever give you".  And then the closing 3:22 is the saddest "La, da, da, da" repeated over and over a gorgeous repetitive guitar lick.  It might be the single saddest song ever (Okay, it's not, I've got another in the chamber, but I'm saving it!), the sound of an absolutely broken heart.

[Lacelle]

I have a metric shit tonne of George Jones on my iTunes and every once in a while a song will just grab my attention. This song just devestated me when I hear it. No one can convey heartbreak like Jones and here he shines.

[piranesi]

Oh, you bastard.  I do not need this right now.  I'm already balling just picking my own posts.  

You deserve this, you monster.  Steal yourself and then surrender your tears.  If you don't know this piece, the words are taken from text scrawled onto the wall of a Gestapo prison cell in "Death's Head" prison in Poland in 1944, including the name and age of the girl who scrawled it there:

"No, Mother, do not weep,
Most chaste Queen of Heaven
Support me always.
Ave Maria

Helena Wanda Blazusiakówna 18 years old"

 

Here is what Gorecki said about the text:

 

"In prison, the whole wall was covered with inscriptions screaming out loud: 'I'm innocent', 'Murderers', 'Executioners', 'Free me', 'You have to save me'—it was all so loud, so banal. Adults were writing this, while here it is an eighteen-year-old girl, almost a child. And she is so different. She does not despair, does not cry, does not scream for revenge. She does not think about herself; whether she deserves her fate or not. Instead, she only thinks about her mother: because it is her mother who will experience true despair.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dMfMAZk24l0

[Death From Above]

[Lamp, broken circa 1988]

maybe I'll put a thing with a guitar later, but this song is my "okay it's time to cry right now" jam

 

EDIT: Having reread the rules, here's what's up. Milo is starting to become my favorite rapper because of songs like this, where he addresses loss and brotherhood in such severely explicit detail, while using nerdy references as what they are- distractions. He tends to make those referential lines when he's trying to avoid the direct terror of a situation, and maybe that just works on me because that's how all my people deal and I see it. And then, regardless of any abstraction, Milo just lays it down:

 

"Every night before I fall asleep I think of where my brother went- How something so real can just disappear, I must be too fucking dense!"

 

And that's when all that distraction fails Milo, and he just starts to come apart.

[piranesi]

Now, Benjamen Britten wrote some of the saddest music of all time in his War Requiem.  So what do you do when that guy dies?

 

If you are named Arvo Pärt, you write this:

 

[piranesi]

Also anyone who posts "Cats in the cradle" is instantly banned. 

 

WE ALL KNOW NONE OF US CAN MAKE IT THROUGH THAT WITHOUT BALLING SO DON'T TEMPT US WITH A LINK!!!!

[caley]

I honestly expected there to be no replies when I came back into this thread.  I'm pretty excited.  Gonna listen to every sad song tomorrow, hopefully!  Keep it going!

[LooseCannon]

Written after the accidental death of Eric Clapton's son, this song makes me re-live the hurt of every painful loss in my life.  I don't know why I even bother listening to it.

 

I must be strong
And carry on,
'Cause I know I don't belong
Here in heaven.

 

[piranesi]

This is Ali.  She is the greatest singer in the world and the one true antidote to Kpop nonsense.  Here she is singing an old song on a "cover song contest" show.  She is trying to explain to her father the things she can't say to him in person.  I think he may have died just before this.  I can't find an English subbed version so go ahead and insert whatever horrible regrets you have in your own life and have a good cry.  Now don't let her openly weeping at the end get to you...nope...just pretend you're a robot...a robot programmed to flood the world with tears.

[piranesi]

I was thinking it over and I decided there's no particular reason to let this turn into a competition.  Better to just go nuclear here on the first page so that we all end up dehydrated and covered in our own snot and/or smeared mascara all at the same time:

 

 

That's right.  I went for two Holocaust songs on one page.  What are you gonna do about it? Nothing! because you're convulsing in tears and making embarrassing snorting sounds when you try to catch your breath.

[piranesi]

Who's in the mood to listen to the lamenting screams of millions of dead Russians?

 

Anyone?

 

 

...Caley?

 

This one has been controversial for a long time.  When it premiered Shostakovich claimed (probably at the point of a gun) that it was about the struggle of the worker to overcome the corruption of capitalism and be renewed in triumph.  That claim kept him alive but most people even back then heard in it instead as testimony of the millions who had been murdered and starved between 1935 and 1937 by Stalin.   If you don't feel like being able to get up in the morning, go ahead and have a listen:

Remember, you asked for this, Caley.  Reap your mournful harvest, you sorrow demon.

[Jingus]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8xjlWFjX1Yw

"Let me tell you all about this time I got raped. In unbearably graphic detail. A capella, no accompaniment."

(Drops mic. Glares at the audience for sixty straight seconds of increasingly-uncomfortable silence. Slowly backs off stage, never breaking eye contact, never ever looking away.)

[DEAN]

Does anyone know where the love of God goes when the waves turn the minutes to hours?

 

 

All that remains the faces and the names of the wives and the sons and the daughters.

[Goodear]

 

A song about screwing up your life.

[odessasteps]

The Pogues - The band played waltzing matilda:

Having just passed the centennary of the start of wwi

[Randy]

Elbow songs are all so melancholy.  Guy Garvey's voice.

 

[JLSigman]

 

"There's no time for us
There's no place for us
What is this thing that builds our dreams

Yet slips away from us..."

 

The fact that it's Brian May's ethereal voice kills me.

[Ramsey]

 

"There's no time for us

There's no place for us

What is this thing that builds our dreams

Yet slips away from us..."

 

The fact that it's Brian May's ethereal voice kills me.

This one also benefits from context. It's used in "Highlander" when Connor's wife aging and he's still a young immortal.

[Control]

 

Jim Wise mercy killed his wife in a hospital at her bedside. And he put the gun to his head and it jammed and he didn't die. He went to trial all summer long and his eyes welled up when he told us about how much she loved the backyard garden and the budding rosebush.

She loved the garden, and its budding rosebush. 

 

A lot of Sun Kil Moon's sentimental songs come off as cloying, but "Jim Wise" makes me weepy.

 

Also, bravo on the tag for this thread.

[odessasteps]

Tom Waits - Martha (album version):

I think i could pick at least half a dozen tom waits song.

[Brian Fowler]

 

 

You're in a bad.  You're on tour.  While you are on tour, your beloved dog dies.  You write a song called All We Love We Leave Behind as a tribute to your dog.

[DEAN]

My favorite sad Tom Waits song:

 

I always figured it was a letter written to his mother about how he's completely fucked up his life.

[DEAN]

LET THE WARREN ZEVON ONSLAUGHT OF SHEER DEPRESSION BEGIN NOW!