The term "sad music" may be a little ambiguous, so before I begin this late night treatise (which turned into a blog written over two days), let me define my term. I'm defining "sad music" as either a combination of minor chords and low notes with lyrics of sorrow or lament, or simply as some sort of music containing lyrics of sorrow or lament.
So what's the appeal of this so-called sad music? Why do I listen to it? Should I? Should I not be filled with joy all the time at the salvation of my wretched soul?
Well, first off, I'll answer that last question with a resounding yes. My every waking moment should be filled with joy because God, in unending love, grace, and mercy, saw fit to send His holy and perfect Son, Jesus, to this world to live a perfect, sinless life and then die an unjust death, taking the place of every horrible person occupying this world, and then raised Him back to life to show his power and victory of death. I should be filled with joy, and when I really begin to fathom and grasp it, I am. But life has a way of ensnaring joy. As the great poet Bret Michaels once said, "Every rose has its thorn." Not to say that life is the ultimate reason I don't live my life in inexpressible joy. My sinful heart probably bares the vast majority of the blame for that. This wretched heart of mine looks at the Unfathomable that is the Gospel of Jesus Christ and scoffs, "Oh, that's nice," and then returns to seeking everything that pales in comparison to the Unfathomable, such as relationships, success, and security. It's not right but what is in this world?
So I've established that I don't live a life of joy. Does that mean I metaphorically spend my days in sackcloth and ashes, cutting myself with pot shards and mentally weighing whether or not to wish for death? Not necessarily. Jesus is what I cling to. His light is the only light that is forever on in this dark world. However, the fact remains that I, like said fact, remain in this dark world. I'm not alone, I am not abandoned, and I am not forgotten. But to an extent, I am disconnected. I can commune with God through prayer and through His word, but until I die or He returns, I will not be able to walk side-by-side with my God. I will not be able to have an audible, fully understandable, one-on-one conversation with God. I'm not fully alone, but I'm not fully in communion either. I'm in the valley of the shadow.
This leads me into my next point: why I listen to sad music. I was thinking about what I was going to write earlier and I jotted down a couple reasons. In no specific order, I listen to sad music for: empathy/commonality, honesty/emotion/passion, lamentation, reality, and conviction/self-reflection.
I'll begin with one of the biggest reasons I, and I imagine most people, listen to sad music: empathy and commonality. While the two are not entirely synonymous, they're pretty close. Empathy develops commonality. So how does this at all relate to sad music? Well, to me it's like being able to talk about something difficult you're going through with someone who is going through or has grown through something similar. I can tell a friend all about my discontent and loneliness but no matter how much they tell me I'll be okay or try to cheer me up, it won't mean near as much if they don't have a true grasp on what it means to be alone. You can't really understand how to fix someone else's frayed wire if your wire has never been frayed.
So, empathy and commonality. I find that you find these in sad music because people are singing about things that are universal. We live in a sin-filled world and are ourselves sin-filled beings, therefore we've all got problems. We can hide it and act like we're good little boys and girls who only think thoughts made of Bible verses but in the pits of our stomachs we all know something's not right. To quote one of my favorite songs by a great band called the National (they sing lots of sad songs), "You'll find commiseration in everyone's eyes." We all hurt. Some just like to pretend that they don't. When these some are the majority, I find commonality in the minority: sad songs. When I'm hurting, lonely, empty, or just plain worn, listening to other people sing about their hurts, loneliness, emptiness, and worn out hearts both makes me feel understood and puts my own problems in perspective.
Music is an extremely powerful medium. Like most things, it can unite and it can divide. Unlike most things, however, it can do both en masse. Personally, I don't really like most people. In fact, I dislike a good percentage of people I come in contact with. And yet, I can go to a concert and be singing or screaming along with the lyrics with people who I might normally not like or want to be around. Music connects people like few other things can. There's so much more I could say regarding this part but for the sake of time and blog length, I'll press on as I do every day.
Honesty/emotion/passion. I'll throw reality in this one as well. Sad music contains some of the most honest and emotional lyrics ever written. I find that in heartbreak, sorrow, or some other awful time in someone's life, they tend to be the most honest. When something so severe as pain or heartache strikes, it can very easily bring you out of whatever mindset you've had for however long you've had it. Maybe you're complacent, maybe you're disinterested about life or people. Pain and sorrow can shake those up. What's the old saying, "you never know what you have until it's gone?" Peace of mind is a gift from God but like all gifts, we can take it for granted and abuse it.
So, things like pain and sorrow can break up peace of mind but how exactly does that bring about honesty? Well, for some, it doesn't, at least not on the surface. Some (i.e most) people respond to hardships by putting on a plaster smile and acting like everything is okay. I imagine people do it mostly for reasons of embarrassment and fear of man, because when other people see that we're not perfect and we can only see their plaster smiles, that must mean we're the problem children. Others still, and here I'm going to borrow one of my favorite quotes from the tv show Scrubs, can be "so afraid to ask
for help but instead they just quietly hope for someone to notice." And even others still, and these are the ones I'm writing this about, put their troubles into words and sometimes music.
I've been thinking about all this lately and I've realized that few troubles are so hard that we can't put them into song. Jilted lover? Put the pain into song. Unrequited affection? Put it into song. Mourning death? Put it into song. Loneliness or fear? Put it into song. Now there exceptions to every rule but for the most part, as humans we have an unrelenting knack for expressing our sorrows through words and songs. I pray I never bare such sorrow as to never be able to sing about it.
So why do we sing when we're troubled? Well, one reason might be catharsis. I was watching the National perform on Austin City Limits the other night and in the closing interview, lead singer Matt Berninger talked about why he writes sad lyrics and how there is something relieving and cathartic in singing sad songs. Cathartic. My little MacBook Pro dashboard dictionary defines Catharsis as, "Providing psychological relief through the open expression of strong emotions." Sounds about right to me. Some people bottle stuff up inside and for them, maybe it works. However, for most people, bottling emotions up doesn't seem to do much good. Sometimes you just have to sing it out. And when you sing it out, be it lyrics you wrote yourself or lyrics someone else wrote from a place similar to yours, there's emotion. You can't think, talk, or sing about something painful and near to your heart without emotion and when you sing about it, that emotion is seemingly amplified. I defy you to try and find a song played and sung with more emotional passion than when Cody Bonnette of As Cities Burn sang "The Widow," a song about his father abandoning him and his family at an early age, live at Cornerstone Fest 2007. When you're singing about something so close to your heart, be it love or be it sorrow, you're being more raw and open than you otherwise would be. That's part of why I listen to sad music.
On to lamentation. Some professing Christians might criticize bands for making music of lamentation. Some might even go so far as to say that it is wrong to focus on the bad parts of life. However, there are multiple books of the Bible written about lamentation, numerous Psalms of it, and even a blessing for those who weep in the Sermon on the Mount. Once Adam and Eve chose themselves over God in the Garden of Eden, mourning entered the world on the coattails of sin. Childbirth became painful, work became toilsome, and relationships became strained and fractured, both vertically and horizontally. So maybe, just maybe, lamentation is a necessary part of the Christian walk in this world. I don't believe it will be a part of the new Heaven and new Earth, but on this broken one on which we live, I think lamentation is even a gift from God. He knows how wretched we are and how wrong we've made this world. I think when we're honest and open about the harshness of life, it gives us an opportunity to look toward the coming of King Jesus, who will usher in a kingdom without tears and without pain.
To me, lamentation is like looking at two paintings. One painting is a beautiful painting. It's a painting where all the colors are in their right places and all the brush strokes are indescribably right. The other is a painting that has some similar semblance of rightness but has been torn up, spat on, beaten, and marred horribly. We live in the second painting, but through God's word we've been given glimpses of the first painting and a hope of it becoming a reality. So, I guess what I'm saying is that lamentation is a comparison. I.e., this is how it shouldn't be and yet this is how it is. Woe is us, we are men of unclean lips.
This leads me to the final established reason (for there are probably many other reasons I've not really thought through) I listen to sad music: conviction and self-reflection. This goes hand-in-hand with much of what I've already said but when I listen to sad music, whether or not I can relate to the themes sung about, it forces me to look at myself. When I listen to About Today by the National, maybe I'm not on the verge of losing someone close to me but listening to Matt Berninger ask "How close am I to losing you?" makes me consider the relationships in my own life. When I listen to Scott Hutchison of Frightened Rabbit singing, "All the hammer and scrape has been chipping away at the luster of life" in Skip the Youth, maybe I'm not feeling worn and tired at that very moment but it draws me to look at the times I do feel that way and both see the difference between the two and also be grateful for the progress. Or maybe I'm still there and it just helps to have a metaphorical drinking buddy. To quote Billy Joel, "We're sharing a drink they call loneliness, but it's better than drinking alone."
There's one last reason I'll give for why I listen to sad music and it will help me transition to why I think sad music is a gift from God. That reason is worship. By worship, I don't really mean what most people picture in their minds. I don't mean some sort of Chris Tomlin put your hands in the air and let the holy flood of faux emotion take hold of you. I mean being honest with God, responding in both repentance and gratefulness, and saying to him, "You alone are God."
When I listen to sad music, it normally leads me towards worshiping God. Now, usually my reasons for listening to sad music are not overly spiritual or godly. Normally, my reasons for listening to sad music is because I'm sad and, well, misery loves company. But along the way, I find that sad music alleviates much of the weight on my heart and mind and in doing this, helps me see the grace that I'm currently experiencing.
All that, plus when I listen to some forms of sad music, there is hope in it, a glimmer in the darkness if you will. I can listen to bands like Frightened Rabbit, the National, or mewithoutYou and find company for my misery but I can also find traces of hope for the future. Now, with the exception of mwY, those bands aren't offering hope in Christ. But I can see the hope that is in Christ through my own worldview and therefore can take the hope offered by secular bands and transition it into understanding capital h Hope. One example of worship through sad songs is the band I just mentioned, mewithouthYou (mwY). They're a band I use to hate when I was younger because I was more immature then than I am now, plus the lead singer doesn't really sing. Instead, he sort of talks/wails the lyrics and to a casual listener, it's not very nice sounding. However, I've really started to appreciate the emotion and heart behind lead singer Aaron Weiss' "singing." In a song that has been a sort of close-to-home prayer for me in the past few months, called C-Minor, Weiss sings about love and loss. However, there is a chorus that is repeated in the song and the lyrics are, "Open wide my door, my Lord, my Lord, to whatever makes me love You more, while there's still light to run towards." Now, it's hard to understand how much this song emphasizes my point if you don't understand the lyrical context of the song, so I highly recommend you listen to the song and read the lyrics. Returning to my point, I think sad music has a way of leading to worship, but only through a Christian worldview. When I listen to sad music, most of the time it leads me to a place where I say, "Okay, God, this isn't how it should be and we both know that." From there, I, and I imagine most people who get to this point, have two options. Option one is to take the advice of Job's wife and curse God. "Surely it's his fault that so-and-so doesn't love me." "Surely it's his fault that I got fired." "Surely it's his fault that this other horrible thing happened to me." If God surely were causing bad things to happen, like some sort of kid on the playground holding a magnifying glass to ants, then he is most worthy of being cursed as a malevolent being. However, that is not God. We are responsible for the broken world, for though we didn't make it, we did make it broken. So option one doesn't really seem plausible or justifiable. That leaves us with option two, which is, to quote the old song, "trust and obey." Option two is saying, "Okay, God, this isn't how it should be and we both know that, but you are in control and I will trust you, even in utter darkness." This option isn't easy and there are often times when I want nothing but option one because my perspective is so skewed and narrow that I can't possibly grasp that maybe God actually does hold the reins.
So why do I consider sad music to be a gift from God? D. All of the above.
But really, I mean all of the above. Sad music is full of honesty, passion, emotion, self-assessment, empathy, commonality, and so much more. Plus, a lot of sad music (at least the stuff I listen to) is just plain good music. Maybe mewithoutYou is a bit heavier or weirder than some people might like, but that doesn't take away from some of the cool music or the beautifully written lyrics. Maybe Frightened Rabbit cusses too much, but that doesn't take away from the ground-level truth apparent in their lyrics. And finally, sad music is a reminder that this world is not my home. To best sum up what I mean by all this, I'll quote mewithoutYou's song Every Thought A Thought of You, "No one here to believe but You. Everyone else is bound to leave but You. When they swear their love is real, they mean 'I like the way you make me feel.' No one here to believe but You." Sad music is a reminder that everyone but Christ will fail me and I them.
I could probably talk about this subject for hours and hours more, but it's hard to have a one-sided dialogue without repeating myself, which I've probably done quite a bit already. So I'll end here listing my favorite sad music bands with a couple tracks that I especially enjoy.
As Cities Burn: Christian, alternative rock. Easily the best lyrical self-reflection of any band I know. I highly, highly, highly recommend this band and every album they've done. First album (Son, I Loved You At Your Darkest) is full of screaming and yet has some absolutely fantastic songs and lyrics and shouldn't be shelved just because of the screaming. Tracks I especially like: The Hoard, Our World Is Grey, Made Too Pretty, and Of Want And Misery: The Nothing That Kills.
Brand New: Secular, alternative rock. Each of their albums has a different style and not all are equally good, but their album The Devil & God Are Raging Inside Me is in my all-time top 5. It's filled with pain, emotion, lack of understanding, trying to understand life and God, and tons of other things that a young'n such as myself can find interest in. TD&GARIM is an album of searching, painful, toilsome searching. It's filled with lamentation too. Tracks I especially like: Millstone, Degausser, and Limousine. Fantastic album as a whole though. And their album Daisy is pretty good too, albeit a little more raw and less searching, more settling on unsettling things. Their older stuff ain't bad either.
Counting Crows: Secular, modern (soft) rock. Mainly I'm just putting them here for their album August & Everything After and even more so for the song "Round Here." It's a great melancholy album as a whole but Round Here is one of those generational songs, in my opinion. It was made before my generation but it doesn't mean any less because of that. Tracks I especially like: Round Here and Time And Time Again.
Frightened Rabbit: Secular, Scottish alternative indie rock. Definitely one of my favorite bands and also one of the most controversial bands I listen to. With multiple songs containing various profanities, sexual themes, and clear attacks on Christianity, why would I like such a band? Well, I don't agree with all that is said in the lyrics. However, the band has a very good sound (I'm a sucker for Scottish music) and even though the lyrics might be pushing it sometimes, there is a lot of truth to be heard. All that, plus Frightened Rabbit conveys loneliness and emptiness better than almost any band I can think of. It's hard to pick my favorite tracks because I greatly like almost every track they've ever done, but a few I most like are: The Modern Leper(language warning: 1 f-word), Poke (language warning: 1 use of c-word, s-word), Keep Yourself Warm (language warning: multiple f-words, sexual themes), My Backwards Walk (language warning: multiple uses of the s-word), and The Loneliness And The Scream. As I said, one of my favorite bands. The amount of profanity in their lyrics might not be ideal but at the same time, I feel like it connects me to the real world more because the real world's pain and sorrow isn't G-rated.
The Gaslight Anthem: I won't write up a paragraph on TGA but they're also one of my favorite bands. They're American Rock in the vein of Bruce Springsteen but lyrically they deal a lot with issues of love, growing up, hardship, etc. I highly recommend them.
The Glorious Unseen: Another honorable mention band. These guys are a Christian band and they've written some of the most down-to-earth and honest worship music I know. Songs of brokenness and yet, such grace.
Jars of Clay: Not really a band one might expect on a list such as this but I find that lyric writer Dan Haseltine has a real good grasp on the balance of pain/sorrow/heartache and Christianity. I like most JoC stuff, though some is better than others. Tracks I especially like: Oh My God, Surprise, Headphones, and There Might Be A Light.
Manchester Orchestra: Another alt. rock band, in the same vein as Brand New. Their album Mean Everything To Nothing is a gem. Tracks I especially like: I Can Feel A Hot One, Shake It Out, and The River.
mewithoutYou: Christian (though not as you might expect), alt. rock with various genres crossed. In the past six months have become a top 5 band for me. From the emotion expressed in the singing, the just plain cool sounding music, the both beautifully written and cut-to-the-heart lyrics, there's quite a lot to love about mewithoutYou. Get past the alternative style of Aaron Weiss and you'll grow to love them. Tracks I especially like: In A Sweater Poorly Knit, My Exit, Unfair, and Elephant In The Dock. Really, there's tons more of great tracks from this band but it's getting really late so these are just three that I really like.
The National: Secular, indie/alternative rock. Again, for time's sake I won't write a lot on this band. Great band, has a lot of great music and lyrics. Sad band for sure. Loads of good songs throughout their albums but their album High Violet is an all-time favorite. I HIGHLY recommend it and the band as well.
Radiohead: Personally, I'm not high on this band like most people with my taste in music are. However, I do have tons of respect for them and would consider myself a casual fan. They've got lots of good songs and albums. My personal favorite album from them is The Bends.
The Twilight Sad / We Were Promised Jetpacks: These are two Scottish rock bands I got into after getting so into Frightened Rabbit. The Twilight Sad is a little more melancholy and subdued than either of the other two, while We Were Promised Jetpacks is more atmospheric rock. I saw them earlier this year and they put on a great show. I very much recommend both bands, especially Jetpacks' In The Pit of the Stomach album.
There are loads more albums and songs from various bands I like that are sad in some ways, but time won't allow me to go further so I'll end here with lyrics from a song by M.Ward:
"I went to the Whale
I said, 'Killer Whale, please,
What do you do when your true love leaves?'
He said, 'I only have but one trick up my sleeve,
I sing it over and over 'til she comes back to me.
I make a sad, make a sad, make a sad, sad song
I make a sad, make a sad, make a sad, sad song.'"
P.S This blog is not to say I only listen to sad music. While most of these bands are amongst my favorites, there are plenty of other bands were aren't necessarily "sad music," such as Thrice, The Decemberists, Oh Sleeper, Fleet Foxes, Death Cab for Cutie, and loads of others. I mean, I've got nearly 50 gigs of music in my iTunes, so I most definitely don't only listen to sad stuff.
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