SAD Song List
Seasonal Affective Disorder season has been upon us for awhile, and I’m a little late with my annual SAD Song List (Blue Songs for the Seasonally Affected), but the day of the winter solstice seemed an appropriate time to celebrate (although, celebrate may be too cheery a word) the seasonal mood through songs of despair, sadness, heartbreak, loss, self-pity, and general hopelessness. Some might see the solstice as the turning point of winter, as the moment when we leave behind the darkness and look toward the light of spring. These people are called optimists, and they might as well stop reading now, as this post is for the rest of us, the SAD ones who know that the solstice is just another step in the long march through the deeply depressing winter season. The SAD season doesn’t really end until, well, it’s too depressing to think about it actually, but let’s just say that, in Maine anyway, winter may last until it’s finally chased away by July 4th fireworks.
My approach to SAD season is not so much to buoy myself with false cheer but to really wallow in the sadness by revisiting my favorite really depressing songs. So, plug in your full-spectrum lights and take your vitamin D supplements, and brace yourself.
As always, it’s good to start the list with a couple of songs about the cause of SAD, the loss of light in winter (or, at least, more generally about darkness and the lack of sunlight, literal and metaphorical).
Lenny Kravitz, “Ain’t No Sunshine” (cover of the Bill Withers original)
Best Coast, “When the Sun Don’t Shine”
Jamey Johnson, “Even the Skies Are Blue”
According to Jamey Johnson, not even God is immune to SAD: “God must by crying / because even the skies are blue.”
Along with Leonard Cohen, Richard Thompson is one of the great sources of SAD songs. How bad can it get? Well, when all your dreams have withered and died, that seems to be as low as you can get.
Love lost is one of the greatest sources of blueness, and nobody does the lost love blues better than Bessie Smith. This is a nice cover of her “Empty Bed Blues” by Anne McCue:
I’m in a Best Coast sort of blue mood, it seems. As Best Coast knows, there’s only one thing worse than an empty bed—and that’s a bed that’s not empty. As they note in and “Wish He was You,” “It’s 6 am I’m in someone else’s bed / Oh I wish he was you”
Two standard themes of sad songs are lost love and unrequited love, and the brilliance of this song by A Fine Frenzy is to combine the two, a sad song of lost unrequited love: A Fine Frenzy, “Almost Lover”
And my favorite SAD song of the year has to be Funkadelic’s “Maggot Brain,” which consists of one long painful guitar solo by Eddie Hazel. “Play it like someone told you your mama just died,” George Clinton told Hazel at the recording session (at least according to legend), and Hazel plays it like everybody just died. This is Michael Hampton playing guitar in this live version.
