Music gives a soul to the universe, wings to the mind, flight to the imagination and life to everything.
–Plato
While sad songs have their place, music is supposed to be about joy, fun, and celebrating life. Annoyingly, when artists write sad songs, they invariably wallow in self-pity over love lost, spurned, deferred, or something in that ballpark. It’s rarely about something more meaningful.
When Elton John and Bernie Taupin wrote Sad Songs (say so much) it alluded to someone losing a friend or partner, the circumstances of which are not elaborated upon. It’s meant to be uplifting, but to my mind doesn’t really qualify as a sad song per se.
For me, a truly sad song must have brooding music and moving yet not depressing lyrics. Sounds impossible, right?
I recently came across a list of the 30 Best Sad Songs in Forbes, the business magazine, of all places. It was published in July last year, so I guess it’s pretty up to date with the latest songs, not that anything of any significant quality, sad or otherwise has been produced since. I found that only Someone Like You by Adele (13), Strange Fruit by Nina Simone (8), Fade Into You by Mazzy Star (6), and Tears in Heaven by Eric Clapton (1) satisfy my definition of a sad song, to any acceptable extent.
Just to give you an idea of what the Top Ten in the Forbes list looked like:
- Tears in Heaven – Eric Clapton
- Dear Mama – Tupac
- Old Man – Neil Young
- A Change Is Gonna Come – Otis Redding
- It’s So Hard To Say Goodbye – Boyz 2 Men
- Fade Into You – Mazzy Star
- You’re Gonna Make Me Lonesome When You Go – Bob Dylan
- Strange Fruit – Nina Simone
- B.W.’s Blues – Tommy Guerrero
- Herfra hvor vi står – Quadron
The saddest song I have ever come across – and I mean tearjerker sad – was Zhuravli (The Cranes) by a Russian actor and singer, Mark Naumovich Bernes. Mark was a highly popular artist from the 1950s-1960s Soviet era. The song describes the “fate of soldiers in WW2, not falling on the battlefield but rather turning into flocks of white cranes flying overhead.”
The lyrics of the song derive from Dagestani poet Rasul Gazmatov, who was inspired to write a poem after visiting a memorial at Hiroshima Peace Memorial Park to Sadako Sasaki, a young Japanese girl who was exposed to nuclear radiation after the bombing of Hiroshima. Mark Bernes, terminally ill with cancer at the time, came across the poem in 1968 and asked Yan Frenkel to compose the music. Bernes apparently imagined himself joining those cranes in the sky being reconciled to his own fate.
Bernes recorded the song in 1969, just a week before his death. The song was played at his funeral and has become one of the most famous Russian-language songs in the world. Here is the English translation of the lyrics:
It seems to me sometimes, that soldiers, Who did not return from blood-stained fields, They didn’t fall at any point on this earth, But were transformed into white cranes
They are to this day, as in distant times, Still flying and sending us their voices. Is this not why so often and with sadness We become silent, while looking at the sky?
A tired flock flies and flies across the sky – It flies in the fog towards the sunset, And in their formation there is a small gap – Perhaps, this place is for me. The day will come, and with the flock of cranes I will fly (lit. swim) through that same blue-grey haze, And from the heavens like a bird calling out To all of you, whom He has left on earth.
I genuinely love this song. I sometimes listen to it when I’m incredibly pissed off about all lunacy in the world and need to compel myself into sadness to keep the rage at bay. It works magnificently.
lenny unencumbered 