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Saddest Song in the World Challenge!


caley

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How do you write the saddest song on a concept album about working in a cancer ward? Throw in a song about abortion:

"We'll make only quick decisions, and you'll just keep me in the waiting room,

and all the while I'll know we're fucked and not getting unfucked soon,

When we get home we're bigger strangers than we've ever been before,

You sit in front of snowy television, suitcase on the floor."

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Apparently all off you had to emotionally block out Patsy Cline

 

 

It would have been cliche to pick "Crazy" plus well... fuck...

 

"I've got your memory, or has it got me. I really don't know, but I know it won't let me be."

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If you want to go Country Music Endless Heartache,  Hank Sr wrote the darkest, most hopeless song (which is OBVIOUSLY my favorite Country song)- You Win Again.

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Right here is just an honest song about loss. Hidden with a catchy riff and some beautiful strings. Plus it was Kurt Cobain's favorite song so there just has t be some underlying pain to it.

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I know this song "I'm so lonesome I could cry" seems too obvious...(and I'm going with the Cowboy Junkies version rather than Hank Williams' version to change things up a bit)  but have you ever really taken a second to come to terms with the lyrics of this song?  At one point it goes:

"Did you ever see a robin weep
When leaves begin to die?
Like me, he's lost the will to live
I'm so lonesome I could cry"

Just think about that for a second.  A robin...a bird mind you...is weeping.  The leaves are turning all around it.  It's world is collapsing.  The things it lives in are dying.  It pauses during its day to notice this...that it's just starting to become impossible to deny it.  And it (A BIRD MIND YOU) begins to weep and can no longer lift itself off the ground.  Why would it bother?  It's world is ending.

THAT IS INSANE!!!  Do you realize how messed up your headspace has to be to think of an image like that?  Jesus, Hank Williams...Jesus.

At another point it goes:

"I've never seen a night so long
When time goes crawling by
The moon just went behind the clouds
To hide its face and cry"

THE MOON IS WEEPING.  The FUCKING MOOOOOON.  The night, which is The Moon's natural habitat, mind you...is so hopeless...so devoid of  warmth and so inevitable and endless that THE MOON ITSELF CAN'T STAND IT ANYMORE and hides it's face behind a cloud so that all the millions of poor depressed individuals below won't see it convulsively weeping and collectively wilt their last shred of hope into the cold dead earth.  THE FUCKING MOOOOOOON IS THINKING THESE THINGS!!!!

I can't even.
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Jay-Z & Beanie Sigel talk about their absentee fathers. Beans verse is especially saddening, he even even starts crying during his verse. Jay gets personal which he isnt entirely known for.

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"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.

 

The day Freddie Mercury died, I listened to this song on repeat for hours.

 

Here's a memorial song that always gets me, no matter how perky it is.

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Knowing how Jason's tale ends, this song can inflict some real damage. It feels exactly how it's named: a farewell transmission.

 

Also, as a student learning psychology & front line therapy (hotlines, crisis centers), there's two verses in here that put a lump in my throat.

 

"The real truth about it is

No one gets it right
The real truth about it is
We're all supposed to try

 

There ain't no end to the sands I been trying to cross

The real truth about it is
My kind of life's no better off
If it's got the map, or if it's lost"

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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.

That album's got four contenders, the one you posted, the one about his sister who died when an aerosol can in the garbage exploded; the one about his uncle who also died in an unrelated aerosol can explosion, but my pick of them is 'Micheline'.  It starts off silly about a mentally-challenged girl knocking on his door when he was younger and asking his father "Can I take a bath with Mark?" and his dad saying Mark (Singer Mark Kozelek) wasn't home and the family laughing about it afterwards.  But then he tells about how some neighborhood thug got her confidence and started stealing her welfare cheques and he busts out "Micheline, Micheline, she wanted love just like anyone else" and that part just gets to me.  And that's without getting into the parts about his teenage friend who had an aneurysm from the weird way he played guitar and his grandmother getting cancer.

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Guest The Magnificent 7

Someone already posted the saddest song, which is And the Band Played Waltzing Matilda by The Pogues.  But this is 2nd. 

 

 

Beautiful, melancholic, the vocals hit just the right note.  My favorite Kinks song, and it's just brilliant. 

 

Sam Stone by John Prine is probably 3rd.  But I am following the rules here, so you'll have to look it up yourself.

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Guest The Magnificent 7

And I'll throw the saddest metal song ever into the mix, too, since we got some metal fans here and Fowler did his duty on that front.

 

 

Soaring yet depressing.  The lyrics...

 

Young hearts born with grief
Shall pay the penalty of truth
A season of stolen youth
Shall teach old hearts to break

It feels like I've been here before
Here to where the animals lay down to die
So we stood alone on a distant store
Our broken spirits in rags and tatters

Nerve and muscle, heart and brains
Lost to Ireland, lost in vain
Pause and you can almost hear
The sounds echo down through the ages
The creak of the burial cart
Here in humiliation and sorrow
Not mixed with indignation
One is driven to exclaim
Oh god, that bread should be so dear
And human flesh so cheap

Young hearts are born with such grief
We have paid the penalty of truth
A season of our stolen youth
Shall teach our hearts to break

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