A while back, I bumped into the lyrics of this song and I was shocked it was not happy times! I enjoyed Johnny Cash's voice here. This next one is the saddest song I've heard for a while, the lyrics are evocative to me. Whiskey Lullaby: He put that bottle to his head and pulled the trigger And finally drank away her memory Life is short, but this time it was bigger Than the strength he had to get up off his knees We found him with his face down in the pillow With a note that said, 'I'll love her till I die.' And when we buried him beneath the willow The angels sang a whiskey lullaby Then the duality of her falling to the same fate from the guilt of his death. Skip to 2 min mark if you don't like extended story intro. The singing is beautiful to me, especially Alison Krauss'.
Wasn't sure about the brand-naming to start with, but I guess 'cranberry juice' doesn't really rhyme. Spoiler Cranberry juice is something cancer patients often drink -- lots of tumours create free radicals; cranberries are high in antioxidants that neutralise them.
This is the song that I listened to non-stop to cope when my father died of cancer while I was in highschool 12 years ago. So it's both soothing and very sad at the same time for me. The Spirit Carries On Dream Theater Where did we come from? Why are we here? Where do we go when we die? What lies beyond And what lay before? Is anything certain in life? They say, "Life is too short," "The here and the now" And "You're only given one shot" But could there be more, Have I lived before, Or could this be all that we've got? If I die tomorrow I'd be all right Because I believe That after we're gone The spirit carries on I used to be frightened of dying I used to think death was the end But that was before I'm not scared anymore I know that my soul will transcend I may never find all the answers I may never understand why I may never prove What I know to be true But I know that I still have to try If I die tomorrow I'd be alright Because I believe That after we're gone The spirit carries on "Move on, be brave Don't weep at my grave Because I am no longer here But please never let Your memory of me disappear" Safe in the light that surrounds me Free of the fear and the pain My questioning mind Has helped me to find The meaning in my life again Victoria's real I finally feel At peace with the girl in my dreams And now that I'm here It's perfectly clear I found out what all of this means If I die tomorrow I'd be alright Because I believe That after we're gone The spirit carries on
This song, for two reasons: 1. This was a sad reality for many of us négers during the mid 20th and even 19th century. Father dies of some illness, and the oldest male of the family has to take on all of the biggest responsibilities so the family can survive. Of course, this wasn't race specific, but the fact that the US was a very racist and often hostile nation towards the very people they enslaved to build the economy they enjoy today made things much worse. My parents grew up in the 50s and 60s and were both living well below the poverty line, and they can relate to this song. Me, not quite as much, aside from the fact that my dad died on my 18th birthday, essentially making me the "man of the house". If you were a néger during that generation, your salary was often half of what a white person made. And no, there wasn't much you could do about it. 2. And this 2nd point might entice some rage among members here but frankly I couldn't care less because I'm entitled to my view on it. What I find to be just as sad as the above sometimes is the fact that you have all these 3rd wave feminists and SJWs complaining everyday about how oppressed they are as a [white] woman, while blogging about it on a Macbook Pro either bought by someone else or themselves with their high paying white collar careers free from persecution and not experiencing an ounce of what I call real oppression a day in their lives. Yes, even the 1st world isn't perfect for everyone, but still, I find it insulting how [white] women are claiming they have it just as bad as or worse than a néger man! Were [white] women ever sprayed with fire hoses, hung from trees and burned with their genitals mutilated, forced to pick cotton with a cat of ninetails whipped on your back, killed on sight by an angry hate group like the KKK or the Nazis, and so on just because "vagina"? Piss off! Being a white woman was considered leisure class compared to being a néger of ANY gender! Hell, there was a time where a néger man would be KILLED for talking or even looking at a white woman. I could go on, but I'm so sick and tired of these idiots dumbing down the word "oppression" to suit their pathetic little victim complex. Sorry (not sorry) for the rant. I just don't believe it gets said often enough. Shogun.
Twenty One Pilots: Cancer. Warning- if you think about it too much (and if someone you know has died from cancer), you'll probably cry... a lot.
I have to say that "Hurt" by Johnny Cash is definitly the saddest - and best - one I can think of. It's is, however, very possible that I have heard sadder ones. On a side note, this song get's close. The bagpipes in the song...
It's not even the music, the lyrics or the video (they're quite dark of course, but nothing out of the ordinary for AiC), but how fragile Layne Staley's voice sounds. You can hear that he was way towards the end of the road when this was recorded.
I tried not to post this one for a while, since it seems a contradiction to post more than one entry to "the saddest" song, but Warren Zevon's version of "Back in the High Life", by Steve Winwood, has got to rank high on the list. If you've only heard the upbeat, original pop song version, do yourself a favor and listen to what Warren does to your dreams:
Is it cheating to use a song from a musical? I don't care, I'm going for it anyway. Without You from Rent. Not only because of it's place in the production itself, but take it out of context and it's still such a painful song about how after a loss or heartbreak, life goes on around you but you're just caught up in this seemingly never ending grief.
Since this has just popped up again I may as well toss in a few thoughts for incredibly sad songs. Everything Leonard Cohen every wrote was depressing. My mum introduced me to him as 'music to slash your wrists to' and that's absolutely accurate. And then there's obvious things like 'Snuff' by Slipknot, 'Darkness Within' by Machine Head (the acoustic version anyway), 'Tearjerker' by Korn (again, the live acoustic version is best), 'Footsteps' and 'Wash' by Pearl Jam, 'Would' by Alice in Chains. But that's not really what comes to my mind when I think of the bleakest things I've personally encountered. There's a couple of bands that I suspect no-one else here will know that I want to throw out. The first is 'Ultra-Noir' who were a very short lived Joy Division-esque band who are really really depression all the time. The song I really want to show you is called 'Angst Macht Frei' which has lyrics such as "Love, love, love, love, love... Blah blah blah... Suicide, suicide... Ha ha ha...". Check them out, for reals they are amazing. I'd also like to point you towards some of Fear Factories album ending tracks. They have been writing semi-concept albums ever since the classic line up got back together and while the whole rest of the albums are just slamming industrial metal they end on poignant, euphoric songs about dying. The two that I'm thinking of are 'Final Exit' and 'Expiration Date'; the former has some of it's lyrics (and even some samples) taken from Jack Kevorkian's writings and speeches about euthanizing terminally ill patients. 'Expiration Date' is about augmented cyborg type folks fulfilling their purpose, becoming obsolete and useless and accepting that, no matter how indestructible they are, they can't live forever. Neither may be your kind of music but I promise it's worth listening at least to at least the first few minutes of the embed: There's times when listening through the albums that just catch me the wrong way and kicks the crap out of me. Finally is Assemblage 23 who are (or is, since it's one guy) a dark EBM/Industrial band who's whole career is incredibly sad and bleak lyrics over techno. You can almost just throw a dart into their back catalog and hit something really sad, interspersed between more 'typical' dancey, moshy EBM. Just off the top of my head I can list off Pages and Damaged and Sorry and Old as just being, well, sad as all hell and there's a lot more than just that. But the two real stand outs are Disappoint and 30 Feet. The chorus of Disappoint is one to cry over at the best of times, doubly so if you know someone who killed themselves. But 30k Feet is a whole other beast. It is by far and away the saddest thing that any of you has ever heard. The first verse is all you need to know to get the gist: "Hello, if you're there pick up the phone I'm calling from 30,000 feet above you The captain's just informed us that our plane is going down So I'm calling for one last time to say I love you" These aren't the kind of things that you might call sad in the same way as lots of the examples here, they aren't tear jerkers like that, but they are the soundtrack to giving up. Edit - I will fix these fucking embeds if it kills me!
Someone posted the Cash cover of Hurt, which I do love (especially when combined with the video), but the original with the use of the tritone (not used in the cover) and Reznor's vocals just pips it.
If you're looking for a tearjerker, just listen to "The Sun is Often Out" by Patrick Wolf a few times. The guy has a beautiful voice, too.
