My wife left me for a lesbian, my dog got shot in a hunting accident, gasoline is four dollars per gallon, I’m out of bourbon, my new job's a hassle and the kids have the flu, but it's sure nice talking to you, Dad. It's been sure nice talking to you.
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Howdy, y’all! Mister Melancholy here, participating in Spunk On A Stick’s ‘SAD SONGS BLOGFEST’.
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You don’t need to tell me that the ‘Sad Songs Blogfest’ is thematically out-of-place here on ‘Ferret-Faced Fascist Friends’ where the menu has traditionally listed politics and product reviews exclusively.
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When my friend Arlee Bird of the famous ‘Tossing It Out’ blog made me aware of Spunk On A Stick’s ‘Sad Songs Blogfest’ idea, I was kicking myself for having closed down my other blog, ‘Stuffs’, recently, ‘cause this Blogfest would have fit perfectly there.
So, I was going to pass on this blog party, but then I thought three things:
1) Uhp! You’re an idiot, Stephen! . . .
2) You KNOW you would have some unique contributions for a ‘Sad Songs’ Blogfest, and . . .
3) so what if it is thematically out-of-place on ‘Ferret-Faced Fascist Friends’? It’s YOUR blog and you can...
DO WHAT YOU WANT!
So, below are my selections.
I could go on all day with this one because I am, after all, “Mister Melancholy”, and I love my sad songs! Hell Heck, I have two very old cassette tapes full of ‘em. One tape is titled ‘Innocence Lost’ (100 minutes of sad songs) and the other is titled - oddly enough - ‘My Sad Songs’ (45 minutes of sad songs). But I decided to limit myself here to just SEVEN SAD SONGS.
Below are some of the saddest songs I’ve ever heard. Five of these aren’t even recorded on the aforementioned cassette tapes, but every one of them has probably brought tears to my eyes at one time or another. (And, damn it, ‘Pagan Streams’ just did it AGAIN!)
This one’s for “Emily” :
‘Caroline No’ by The Beach Boys
This one’s for my Ma, may she rest in peace :
‘Jody Girl’ by Bob Seger
This one’s for Goldenshadow :
‘Magic Journeys’ by The Sherman
This one’s for “The Countess” :
‘Pagan Streams’ by Van Morrison
This one’s for every woman I ever loved and lost :
‘Photographs And Memories’ by Jim Croce
This next one is a strange video that doesn’t quite work for the song instrumental. If I had my way, the video would be displaying images photographed from a car that’s traveling north on the Santa Ana Freeway at night.
The music includes a violin (sad enough 4 U?) This is one of my all-time favorite recordings :
‘Sarah’s Crime’ by Toshi Hinata
I don’t explain if you don’t understand :
‘Sing’ by The Carpenters
This one’s for Nappy and me and our Orange County
‘Times Of Your Life’ by Paul Anka
Hear other bloggers’ Sad Songs by clicking HERE.
YE OLDE COMMENT POLICY: All comments, pro and con, are welcome. However, ad hominem attacks and disrespectful epithets will not be tolerated (read: "posted"). After all, this isn’t Amazon.com, so I don’t have to put up with that kind of bovine excrement.
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I don't know any of these, maybe I'm not as old as I think,hmm! Great selection though, I loved the Bob Seger one :)
ReplyDeleteUniversal Gibberish
"My wife left me for a lesbian, my dog got shot in a hunting accident, gasoline is four dollars per gallon, I’m out of bourbon, my new job's a hassle and the kids have the flu, but it's sure nice talking to you, Dad. It's been sure nice talking to you." - pretty much sums it up!
ReplyDeleteAlthough I didn't know them all I did listen to them being a music love. This was an excellent list and a pleasure to listen to.
ReplyDeleteYvonne,
What? No Bob Dylan or Tom Waits? Um ... do you have a fever? Flu? I'm worried about you!
ReplyDeleteGreat classic and strong song list!
ReplyDeleteJeremy [Retro-Zombie]
Visit The Madness:
iZOMBIE
Nice picks, but no Tom Waits or Bob Dylan? I was going to go with a Beach Boys song but though a lot of them sounded sad the lyrics more expressed longing and love. Your pick was right. I also though Morrison, but once again nothing sad came to mind. This morning I started thinking about Seger's "On the Road Again". "Sarah's Crime"--very nice but it sure has a weird ending--I don't know if was supposed to be that way or not.
ReplyDeleteGlad you did this one. I knew you'd come out a champ.
Lee
Sad Songs Blogfests—Places I Remember
Wrote By Rote
An A to Z Co-host blog
G
man! another post where i don't know any of the songs...
ReplyDeleteyikes!
*music fail*
TO ALL COMMENTERS:
ReplyDeleteThanks for coming by and sayin' sumpin'. I'm REALLY surprised that a couple of you didn't know ANY of these songs! I mean, I knew I was old, but I didn't know I was that old. Sheesh.
Of course, there are a couple recordings here that I anticipated few if any of you would be familiar with ('Magic Journeys', 'Sarah's Crime', and perhaps 'Pagan Streams'), but 'Sing', and 'Caroline No', and 'Photographs And Memories' I figured EVERYONE has heard once or a million times.
I also assumed that the stolen lyric from the famously sad song 'Cats In The Cradle' in the opening paragraph is something EVERYONE would immediately recognize as well (i.e., "the new job's a hassle and the kids have the flu but it's sure nice talking to you...") but I now suspect that also went utterly unrecognized by most of ya. Wow! How did I get SO OLD?!
ALLIALLO: At first I was planning to include Dylan's 'You're A Big Girl Now', but his version was not available at YouTube. I did find a pretty good cover version of it by some bloke, but decided not to use it since it wasn't Bob's heartbreaking original. Tom Waits I briefly thought about as well ('Broken Bicycles') but there were just too many to choose from and I wanted to keep my list to a manageable size.
BOIDMAN: The ending of 'Sarah's Crime' - if you're referring to that long stretch of silence and then the screeching noise that lasts for about 5 seconds - well, that's just a flaw in the video's production. That instrumental really ends with the musical notes fading out at the end. I don't know what to make of that silence 'n' screeching. Extraterrestrial alien interference or sumpin', I s'pose.
~ D-FensDogg
'Loyal American Underground'
Thank you for stepping outside of the norm today. Most of those are before my time, but I know the last two songs well.
ReplyDeleteSPUNKY ~
ReplyDeleteGreat idea for a blogfest! Thanks for coming up with it, as I enjoyed putting this list together.
~ D-FensDogg
'Loyal American Underground'
McDogg-
ReplyDeleteI expectd you to have "A Woman In Love" on there just because of a discussion we had way back when about that line in the last verse.
Obviously I am not as familiar with the Beach Boys' catalogue as you-I wouldn't think it possible for them to have a sad song!
LC
LC ~
ReplyDeleteActually, 'A Woman In Love' never even crossed my mind. There are just SO MANY GREAT "Sad Songs" to choose from that I thought it was nearly miraculous I was able to trim my list down to just these.
I really, really wanted to use Dylan's 'You're A Big Girl Now'.
And, as for The Beach Boys...
Ha! Actually, they have several songs that I think of as being wistfully sad. 'Caroline No' probably isn't even my #1 in that department. 'The Warmth Of The Sun' might be, to me, their saddest song, but I know I've posted it before, somewhere on 'Stuffs', and decided to choose something different.
Other B.B. songs I might have used are 'Don't Worry, Baby' and 'All Summer Long'. The latter one is really quite upbeat and most folks probably wouldn't think of it as "sad", but it's really reminiscing about good times in the past, and so there's an underlying sadness to it. At least to me.
Another "reminiscing" song they sing is 'Do It Again'. Love it. Yeah, seriously, there were probably eight different Beach Boys songs I might easily have selected for this list.
But I figured no one could possibly listen to 'Caroline No' and fail to notice that it's drenched in melancholy.
~ D-FensDogg
'Loyal American Underground'
You're getting off cheap with gas only $4 a gallon. :)
ReplyDeleteLove your picks. Van Morrison is always good and moody.
I know some of the artistes, but I'm not familiar with most of your picks. More new discoveries.
ReplyDeleteI too seemed to have missed the boat on this one, but all good tracks to add to my new sad song playlist, thanks!
ReplyDeleteI'm having a hard time imagining a Beach Boys' song that doesn't sound like "Wouldn't It Be Nice."
ReplyDeleteI'll need to nreak out some CD's and listen (been a while)-didja know they've got a new CD coming out (I think in June)?
The Capenters song was not the obvious one-I never thought of this one as sad.
You're right-too many good ones.
LC
M.PAX:
ReplyDeleteActually, here in Phoenix (where I know it's usually a bit lower than in the rest of the country, although I couldn't tell you why) gas is really about $3.90 a gallon - Arco being the cheapest, and the place where I buy it. I just rounded it up to $4.00, which it will be soon here anyway.
DISCDUDE:
Karen Carpenter couldn't sing ANYTHING without it somehow sounding sad. I mean, I'll bet she could have sung "Happy Birthday" and it would have made me misty-eyed.
Yeah, I knew 'SING' was an unusual choice (like, over 'Superstar'?; 'Yesterday Once More'?; 'Rainy Days And Mondays'?), and that's why I prefaced it with this:
"I don’t explain if you don’t understand."
I COULD explain the several reasons I really do find 'Sing' to be one of her saddest, but... suffice to say that in the same sort of backward way that we label certain songs "The Blues" but they're usually really more soulful than sad, Karen's 'Sing', despite being an ostensibly happy song, really has a potent sad undercurrent to it, especially because of the addition of all those sweet, young, innocent voices in the children's choir.
'Sing' really has made me choke up more than once. (But then again, I'm a puss.)
~ D-FensDogg
'Loyal American Underground'
With the exception of Sing, I'm not familiar with any of these. Thanks for sharing them and expanding my music knowledge. I particularly liked Photographs and Memories!
ReplyDeleteStephen,
ReplyDeleteThese are songs my mom listened to. I say that not to be rude. I say it because it's the truth. Not bad though.
Br'er Marc
BR'ER MARC ~
ReplyDeleteYour Mom had EXCELLENT taste in music!
~ D-FensDogg
'Loyal American Underground'